Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
What should be taken from this record of the complexity gurus? Certainly, they have technical knowledge which few can match. And, they keep track of developments in their respective areas much more thoroughly than nonspecialists. So, given that, why are their judgments frequently so mistaken?
– NYT: As Oil Industry Fights a Tax, It Reaps Billions From Subsidies
– Aleklett: Oil in the veins of sub-Saharan Africa
– SciAm: What happens when coal is gone?
– WaPo: Pigs in Takoma Park highlight rise in suburban livestock
– Titanic Syndrome
If we choose to marginalize and destroy our oil and gas infrastructure – we will see what “Hubbert’s Cliff” looks like, due to accelerating depletion. I suspect that the accompanying scenario would make Mr. Kunstler’s novel look like a walk in the park.
(Comments added.)
Hurricane Alex, the first hurricane of the season, hampered the Macondo oil well disaster clean-up efforts in the Gulf of Mexico on Wednesday and resulted in the precautionary closure of 25% of crude oil production in the area. Reports indicate however that it didn’t cause any delay to the drilling of relief wells on which so much hope rests…
A new narrative reverberating in right-wing political circles blames the Deepwater Horizon disaster on a favorite scapegoat: the federal government.
This past week at the Transition Network Conference 2010 in the UK, the speaker Stoneleigh rocked everyone’s paradigm with her talk “Making Sense of the Financial Crisis in the Era of Peak Oil”.
-Exclusive: Was disregard for industry standards on BP rig worse than we thought?
-Deep Water Oil The Final Frontier
-Senate Panel Ends Liability Limits for Offshore Spills
If French intellectual Jean Baudrillard were still alive to deconstruct the unfurling Gulf oil disaster, I’m sure he’d marvel at the hyperreality of it all. Me, lacking the vocabulary, I’m going to call it reality TV.
A midweekly roundup of peak oil news, including:
-Prices and production
-Deepwater Horizon
The UK Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) published their quarterly Energy Trends document last week. It covers up to the first quarter 2010…It’s a familiar story: every year the UK’s primary energy production declines significantly. Today, primary energy production is almost half what it was at the peak just a decade ago. Has any other country, let alone major economy experienced such a speed and magnitude shift in its energy system outside wartime?
At last report BP was making progress on the relief wells that are being drilled to plug the runaway well in the Gulf. The London Times reports that BP hopes to penetrate the casing of the leaking well and start pumping in well-sealing mud in about two weeks. Let’s hope something works.
The race is on: can we extract the last remnants of Western oil from such unlikely places as the ocean floor before the global economy picks up enough to test out the hypothesis that supplies have already peaked?
