Media & Communications

Peak Oil Not a Problem According to NY Times; Scientific American – Our Response on the Financial Aspects

by

Recently, we have had two new articles aiming to put to rest people’s fears about peak oil. One is from the New York Times: Oil Industry Sets a Brisk Pace of New Discoveries It talks about the many discoveries this year, and how, if they continue at the pace they have in the first half, they will be the best since 2000. The other is from the October Scientific American, called Squeezing More Oil from the Ground…Its premise seems to be that there are a lot of promising areas that we have not yet explored. When you put this together with advances in drilling and the promises of secondary and tertiary recovery, there is a good chance that oil production will not peak for many years.

The Aftermath of the Great Recession, Part II

by

The outlook for consumption growth in the over-leveraged United States is bleak. Economists Menzie Chinn and Jeffrey Frieden discussed the origins of the financial crisis, the debt situation in the U.S. and the global outlook in Reflections on the Causes and Consequences of the Debt Crisis of 2008. This text broadly describes the origin of the crisis.

San Francisco’s Peak Oil Task Force Report: Excellent, But Lacking

by

Now the Task Force’s final Report, completed last March, is being formally considered by the Supervisors on Thursday, Sept. 24, at 1 pm in the Legislative Chamber in City Hall. In this critique I point to positive, progressive initiatives in the Report, some weak areas in it, and above all the essence of understanding peak oil and its implications — significantly lacking in San Francisco and beyond.

Soil, Seeds, Salt: Education Brought Down to Earth

by

Dandelion leaves flown thousands of miles north from Mexico now grace the organic section of our best local grocery stores…I find myself smiling at the latest proof of the power of our greening greenbacks. I am as well amused and saddened by the irony that the leaf generously and effortlessly yielded every hour for most months of the year by soil and worms in our own backyards must be carried north in airplanes guzzling barrels of oil and spewing millions of pounds of greenhouse gases.

Review of CNA Report: “Powering America’s Defense: Energy and the Risks to National Security” (May 2009)

by

This report was issued by the Center for Naval Analyses’ Military Advisory Board, which consists of a dozen retired senior military officers. Powering America’s Defense comes two years after the Military Advisory Board’s landmark report, “Climate Change” (May, 2007). This review of Powering will examine the way its authors deal with the issues of peak oil, oil imports and the potential for oil supply shocks.