Oil

Oil, Iran and the peak – March 8

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– Stop blaming oil speculators and start listening to them: A war with Iran would devastate the economy
– We Can Live with a Nuclear Iran
– Oil creeps toward top of Asia’s economic worry list
– 10th ASPO-International Conference in Vienna May 30 – June 1
– Ölreserven: Der “Doomsday” war gestern

The peak oil crisis: East Coast refineries redux

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Last week, the U.S. Department of Energy issued a detailed report on what could happen to the availability of oil and prices in the event the third and largest of the three Philadelphia refineries in question be forced to close down this coming July. Given enough time, the markets and the infrastructure will rebalance, but for now it looks as if the Northeast may be in for some abnormally high gasoline and diesel prices in comparison to the rest of the country.

Why high oil prices are now affecting Europe more than the US

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This time around, Europe, and in particular the Eurozone, is the area of the world getting hit the hardest by high oil prices. Part of this has to do with the relative level of the Euro and the US dollar.

In the end, it may not matter which countries were first and most affected by limited oil supply and high oil prices. It will be all of us that feel the impact.

Seussian paradigm shift

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I was thinking of Seuss this morning, because my children are anxious to celebrate his birthday, but also because it strikes me that the world-turned-upside-down qualities of our present situation are in some ways Seussian. And how surprising is that, when so many of us were formed by his writing? I suspect, thinking about Seuss’s endings and stories, that maybe we owe him more than we think – some measure of our ability to process reality, rather than fantasy, may come precisely from the fantasy creator.

Forget the ‘golden age’ of capitalism: there’s no return, and our future can be better

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Not only are high levels of growth an undesirable goal and an utterly insufficient rubric for assessing the ‘common wealth’, it is also simply not possible to return to the annualized GDP growth of the post-war ‘golden age’.

Amory Lovins lays out his clean energy plan

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For four decades, Amory Lovins has been a leading proponent of a renewable power revolution that would wean the U.S. off fossil fuels and usher in an era of energy independence. In an interview with Yale Environment 360, he talks about his latest book, which describes his vision of how the world can attain a green energy future by 2050.