Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
The US administration ended its moratorium on deepwater drilling this week seven weeks ahead of schedule. The lifting of the ban – put in place in the wake of the BP Macondo oil well explosion – was greeted with muted enthusiasm from the oil industry…
The hard news is that there is no “Plan B.” The future is likely to be more chaotic than you probably think. This was the primary conclusion that I came to after attending the most recent Association for the Study of Peak Oil & Gas (ASPO) in Washington, DC in October, 2010.
A mid-week roundup of peak oil news, including:
-Developments this week
-The deep-water drilling ban
The witch of Hebron, herself a prostitute, is a beautiful, charming, intelligent caricature, overly-idealized by Kunstler who argues that in a post-collapse world, the rights of women and minorities, so dramatically achieved in the twentieth century, will become virtually extinct in a “world made by hand”.
Oil is “the lifeblood of modern civilisation”. This paper provides an overview of the global oil market. In particular, it examines the outlook for oil supply and demand over the next five years, and the economic consequences.
We are failing at even the most basic risk management. The real-time convergence of peak oil, peak food, and severe instabilities in the global economy may terminally collapse the systems upon which we depend for our basic welfare. The principal risk management challenge is not about how we introduce the energy infrastructure and conservation measures to maintain those systems, but about how we deal with the consequences of their collapse.
Summaries of talks by Art Berman, Rick Munroe, Tad Paczek, Ken Zweibel, Ralph Nader, Anthony Perl, Dr. Charles Schlumberger, Sharon Astyk and Brian Czech.
For peak oil devotees, When Oil Peaked is a special treat, an eminently welcome update from a heavyweight within the field. For those who are new to peak oil or who just want a general overview, however, it’s a little more of a mixed bag. The sections on logistic versus Gaussian curves and other technical matters get awfully involved and esoteric, and casual readers may lack the fortitude to wade all the way through them. But the less involved parts on solutions, recommendations for policymakers and steps that each of us can take will hold the rapt attention of serious and casual readers alike.
– Basra in southern Iraq has been transformed – thanks to oil
– Iraq has the oil stores, but does it have the know-how?
– Behind the coup in Ecuador
– Ecuador’s economy under Correa: 21st century socialism or the New-Extractivism? (Alberto Acosta interview)
For the moment, Beijing’s strategic priority has been to carefully develop a remarkably diverse set of energy-suppliers. If China has so far proven masterly in the way it has played its cards in its Pipelineistan “war”, the U.S. hand — bypass Russia, elbow out China, isolate Iran — may soon be called for what it is: a bluff.
– Experts at ASPO Conference Fear Big New U.S. Job Losses, Economic Downturn
– White House to Lift Ban on Deep-Water Drilling
– ASPO-USA: New Warnings About the Challenges of Oil Depletion
– Kurt Cobb’s peak oil novel
This chapter is a scandal to the peak oil movement (if there is such a thing as a “peak oil movement”). I suspect it will go a long way toward discrediting peak oil as an oil company conspiracy to both raise the price of oil and destroy the planet in the process. They attempt to create doubt about anthropogenic global warming (AGW) in order to advance their own thesis about how to best mitigate declining oil production.
