Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Ten years ago, energy analyst Steve Andrews challenged widely respected energy guru Amory Lovins via email for what Andrews thought was an overly optimistic vision—about coal consumption trends, evolution in the auto industry, future world oil production, etc.—articulated in the Rocky Mountain Institute‘s Spring 2000 newsletter. …Ten years later, read it for the blind spots everyone had.
Most of us have not bothered to comprehend the yawning gulf that lies between our best intentions and our abject dependence on the wealth-producing properties of petroleum. Nor how this addiction fills us with delusions of godlike mastery over our environment while blinding us to the reality that we humans have grossly overshot our planet’s carrying capacity.
Today, we are rarely called upon to find the limits of our compassion. In a post-peak oil world that will in all likelihood no longer be the case.
– Lloyd’s adds its voice to dire ‘peak oil’ warnings
– Emirates banker: Will oil be coal?
– India cuts gas subsidy in favor of greener investments?
– Peak oil postponed again
Hopes rose this week that BP may be in a position to attempt to ‘kill’ the Macondo oil leak a couple of weeks ahead of its previously anticipated date. The first of two relief wells is now close to the target, and a top BP executive is reported to have told Wall Street Journal that, should weather conditions remain favourable, the well could be shut off by 27th July. With this optimistic, but by no means assured backdrop, Tony Hayward spent this week visiting Middle Eastern investors in an attempt to shore up BP against hostile takeover bids…
-Climate photo of the week: BP oil spill
-Canada: The Saudi Arabia of the North?
-The Gulf Spill – The Battle over the Drilling Moratorium
The current generation will not escape the consequences of rising energy and material resource costs. An appealing but superannuated ideology keeps the public in the dark. More light!
The ruined Louisiana marshes remain off limits, but locals gather at a fund-raiser in New Orleans’ Vaughan’s Bar and work out what they can do, as the oil spreads ever eastwards
A mid-week update of peak oil news, including:
-Prices and production
-Deepwater Horizon
The blogosphere overfloweth with indignation and facts and advice for third-persons regarding the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. So let’s get personal instead. Consider for a moment the various ways which WE (that would be you and me) might choose to relate to it. Ready?
It wasn’t supposed to turn out this way. The industrialized world was supposed to have time to prepare alternatives to oil. Or so goes the mainstream story.
Earth’s population is approaching seven billion at the same time that resource limits and environmental degradation are becoming more apparent every day…Resource scarcities, especially oil, are likely to limit future economic growth; the demographic transition that has accompanied economic growth in the past may not be possible for many nations today.
