Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
-Independent Study: Oil Shale Is a Poor Energy Source
-Scientists Cast Doubt on Claims BP Spill’s No Threat to Gulf
-Ecuador pledges no oil drilling in Amazon reserve
-Deepwater oil drilling moratorium job-loss picture is getting clearer
-We Fight for the Oil We Need to Fight for the Oil
-Oil company, law enforcement block media access to public sites hit by Michigan oil spill
Two must-read interviews with energy market investors both point to a coming demand-driven spike in oil prices, despite professing differing views on peak oil.
Rick Rule, founder of Global Resource Investments, Ltd., speaks of “sharply higher world oil prices in the next 5 years,” and Charles Maxwell, senior energy analyst for Weeden & Co. that “oil will reach at least $150 a barrel around 2015.” It’s interesting that, despite professing different takes on the concept of peak oil, they end up at remarkably similar conclusions about demand outstripping supply within the next few years.
This essay this isn’t about bitterness. It’s about the decisions we make in light of an ambiguous future. One of the costs of making moral choices is breaking the strong emotional ties to a prior life. My own future, if I have one, is necessarily rooted in the past. For the better part of a decade, I was the model professor, if only from the standpoint of university administrators.
There seems to be an on-going debate among peak oilers and many economists as to which came first, the chicken (peak supply flow) or the egg (peak demand).
With BP’s oil well close to being permanently sealed, we are beginning to gain more insight into the effects the blowout will have on oil production in the years ahead.
It is “morally unconscionable” for the fossil fuel industry, and the politicians who carry their water in Congress, to stand in the way of action on climate change, says Climate Progress blogger Joe Romm. A Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress and former US Department of Energy official, Romm says California voters have an opportunity this November to defeat the forces seeking to delay action on climate change by rejecting an attack on AB 32…
Left unaddressed during the past 3 years in most of the debates between economists has been the problem of energy. The reason is simple: post-war economists don’t do energy, except as an ever-expanding resource that the credit system and technology makes available. For the post-war economist, the supply curve of energy–save for brief lags–is always coming back into rough equilibrium with the economy.
A weekdly roundup of peak oil news, including:
-Oil and the global economy
-The Macondo well
-In the Congress
-Quote of the Week
-Briefs
If rhetoric could move mountains I’d like to see the Rocky Mountains moved to northern Michigan so I could view the magnificence of Lake Superior from the top of Long’s Peak. Unfortunately I’m not expecting to see that day.
I find myself these days especially attentive to people talking about their preparations for a post-peak oil world. I am partly learning and partly measuring myself against their level of preparation. If they are, in my evaluation, further along than I am, my focus is even more intense. That has turned out to be an important clue for me about what it will take to convince the public about the dangers of peak oil.
Linda Flood from Veckans Affärer [“The Week’s Business”, a Swedish newspaper] has contacted Kjell Aleklett, president of ASPO International, during the summer to discuss BP and the leak in the Gulf of Mexico. They also discussed how the oil companies handle the technology for drilling in deep water and, most importantly, if they have developed technology to cope with “blowouts”.
What kind of life do you want, and what are you willing to do to get it? Keith Farnish, author of Time’s Up! An Uncivilized Solution to a Global Crisis, sees industrial civilization as the most destructive way of living yet devised by humans. And it’s over: environmental degradation and depletion tell us it can’t continue. The system has myriad ways to make us believe we can’t live without it. But Keith believes we can – there are countless ways to move forward into contented, happy, and full lives. We can “disengage” and reconnect with the natural world, ourselves, and others.
