Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
“If we refuse to take into account the full cost of our fossil fuel addiction—if we don’t factor in the environmental costs and national security costs and true economic costs—we will have missed our best chance to seize a clean energy future.”
–President Barack Obama, Carnegie Mellon University, June 2, 2010
Crude oil in the gulf yields good TV images, but BP and its contractors have untapped a geyser not only of oil, but of methane–more than 20 time as effective as CO2 at holding heat. The percentage of the gush that’s methane is roughly estimated at 40-50%, subject to verification.
With the BP Horizon Blowout, we may be hitting a turning point in belief systems, in more than one way:
• Can businesses really be expected to regulate themselves, with minimal oversight?
• Can technology solve all our problems?
• If there are technological solutions, can they be expected immediately?
• Can we really depend on the oil supply that everyone has told us is here?
Boy am I ever humbled to have been featured in the New York Times story ‘Imagining life without oil, and being ready.’
A weekly roundup of peak oil news, including:
– Oil and the Global Economy
– The impacts of Deepwater horizon
– Briefs
The ongoing economic collapse will not reach completion while the television remains on. Viewers are simply too easily and chronically manipulated by the irresistible medium. Resistance is futile.
The Chief Executive Officer of insurance giants Lloyds is warning that the world is facing a “period of deep uncertainty” over the decline of fossil fuels – and may soon be coping with $200-a-barrel oil.
The new way of procuring food, by direct connection with a local farmer, is called “Community Supported Agriculture,” CSA for short, a movement which sprouted in Europe and Japan in the 1960s, and took root in the U.S. in the early 90s. It’s also an old way of procuring food, that is, from neighbors who you know and trust.
But our cultural ignorance concerning basic energy numeracy, as well as an understanding of the economics of oil and energy allows otherwise intelligent and well-informed people to participate in outrage towards BP without reflecting for a moment on their own attitudes, habits, or behavior.
Well, well, well. Who woulda thunk it? Goliath went down hard. Goliath, in his latest incarnation as California utility leviathan Pacific Gas & Electric, took to the field armed with all the weapons 45 million dollars can buy against…a pair of tiny websites and a tall red-haired dude with a busted video camera. And got his ass handed to him.
It is now 8 weeks since the Deepwater Horizon Explosion, and while BP claims to be capturing around 15,000 barrels of oil a day, there are still widely varying estimates of the amount of oil still escaping into the ocean. As public and political anger against the company increase, the knock on effects of the disaster for the company and the industry are growing.
A newly released report from Lloyds Insurance and Chatham House does an amazing job of putting the case for Transition to a business audience. It states that any business seeking to be successful in the future will need to be prepared for ‘dramatic changes in the energy sector’, and that energy dependency will become a key vulnerability. This is, in effect, the Hirsch Report for British business.
