Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
If you are on-board with the sentiment that we should strive to reduce the amount of energy we consume as a means to relieve pressure on a world suffering impending energy scarcity, then you probably want to know how one might proceed. In this post, I will describe the single-biggest energy-saving strategy I have employed in my home in the past five years, which slashed my natural gas consumption by almost a factor of five.
– Oil Price Distant From 1980s Agony When U.S. Income Adjusted
– Bill McKibben: Why Not Frack?
– Uranium production in Africa, and what it means to be nuclear
– Peak oil starts to bite the budget
For the oil industry this was CERAweek. As might be expected the conference was an occasion for considerable optimism about energy breakthroughs and successes especially in unconventional production. Behind the self-promotion there were nonetheless some notes of alarm in the air…
-Garth Lenz: The true cost of oil (TEDX talk with photos)
-To the Last Drop (video)
-Exxon in spotlight after Papua New Guinea landslide
– Stop blaming oil speculators and start listening to them: A war with Iran would devastate the economy
– We Can Live with a Nuclear Iran
– Oil creeps toward top of Asia’s economic worry list
– 10th ASPO-International Conference in Vienna May 30 – June 1
– Ölreserven: Der “Doomsday” war gestern
We have a brand-new entrant to the oil-eating-bug-runs-amok tradition: the self-published novel Petroplague. It’s a Crichton-esque thriller written by microbiology professor-turned author Amy Rogers, who says she aims to “blur the line between fact and fiction so well that you need a Ph.D. to figure out where one ends and the other begins.” The plot involves a batch of experimental, oil-hungry bacteria inadvertently loosed upon Los Angeles, which proceed to wreak a near biblical swath of destruction. Part ecology lesson and part cautionary tale, Petroplague is an entertaining entrée into the subject of oil depletion and its implications for society, human health and the environment.
My personal journey into home energy reduction began with taking stock of past energy use as reported on my utility bills. I quickly migrated toward reading the meters directly to gauge the impact of particular activities. What I learned from our gas meter shocked me, and ultimately led to our single-biggest energy-saving behavioral shift. I’ve already ruined any hope of suspense in the title of the post, but just how bad does something have to be before I’ll resort to a word like “evil? And how bad are your own demons? Ah—now you can’t wait to find out!
-Rolling Stone Responds to Chesapeake Energy on ‘The Fracking Bubble’
-Why Not Frack? – Book & Film review
-Fracking: The New Global Water Crisis – Report
-Kept in Dark by BC’s Oil and Gas Commission
-A Fresh Scientific Defense of the Merits of Moving from Coal to Shale Gas
– Telegraph: Plateau Oil meets 125m Chinese cars
– Globe & Mail: All the signs point to a falling oil price – except supply
– WSJ: Oil Gives Economy Both Barrels
– WSJ: For Europe, Costly Oil Could Be ‘the New Greece’
– Rolling Stone: Why Obama Is Wrong About Natural Gas
-Gas: Climate Panacea or Industry Propaganda?
-Estimates Clash for How Much Natural Gas in the United States
-The Big Fracking Bubble: The Scam Behind the Gas Boom
-Poland May Cut Shale Gas Estimates After Data From Wells
-China claims world’s biggest shale gas reserves
Brent oil briefly touched $128/barrel on Thursday as pressure on Iran over its nuclear programme continued, the latest development being demands from Israel on the US to be more explicit in its threat of military action. The sharply rising prices are already impacting the weakened economies of Europe and the US making some wonder whether sanctions intended to hurt Iran could be backfiring…
– Telegraph: Soaring oil prices will dwarf the Greek drama
– Geoengineering is going to happen. Desperate people do desperate things,
– Gas: climate panacea or industry propaganda?
– Gingrich is wrong on both gun racks in Chevy Volts and US energy policy
– La future rente des gaz de schiste: une malédiction à conjurer par l’intelligence
