Oil

Oil and geopolitics: a turbulent year, and no end in sight

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Kazakhstan is moving fast to pacify its restive west as a new video circulates in which police shoot and beat retreating oil workers protesting labor conditions. Two reasons: With parliamentary elections three weeks away, President Nursultan Nazarbayev (pictured above) wants to stamp out any political narrative conflicting with his long-time assertion of keeping Kazakhstan stable. Abroad, the jittery global oil market is already starting to factor in a possible disruption of Kazakhstan’s 1.5 million barrels a day of oil exports

YOU ARE HERE: The Oil Journey Presentation

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Thanks to your support, we have just completed "You Are Here: The Oil Journey." This is a customizable presentation *you* can use to tell your own journey and to invite new people to join the larger conversation. This animated slide show delivers PCI’s core message honestly, but in a compassionate way that…well, just watch it and see for yourself.

 

The peak oil crisis: 2012 – apocalypse now?

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A case can be made that some very bad things might be coming in the next year or so. There would seem to be two fundamental problems behind the coming upheavals. One is that we are running into constraints on resources and the other is that the OECD nations have simply accumulated so much debt that it is unlikely to ever be repaid.

No one ever thinks of the atmosphere’s ability to absorb and carry off carbon emissions as a resource, but as the world’s climate changes for the worse, that is exactly what it is. It could easily turn out over the course of the next 10 decades, that the atmosphere’s ability to absorb greenhouse gases turns out to be far more important than reserves of fossil fuels.

Massacre of oil workers in Kazakhstan

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– NYT: Defying Police Crackdown, Kazakh Protests Continue
– The Massacre Everyone Ignored: Up To 70 Striking Oil Workers Killed In Kazakhstan By US-Supported Dictator
– Kazakhstan: Riots Not Prelude to Arab Spring
– Seeing Revolution Everywhere: the ‘Kazakhstan Spring’ That Isn’t

OPEC says, ‘Don’t count on us’ for more supply

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The results of OPEC’s latest meeting to set oil production quotas were announced this morning. Instead of production targets for individual countries, a group production ceiling of 30 million barrels a day was set. This amount is a bit less than OPEC produced in November 2011 (actual 30.367 mbd), according to its reckoning, and less than it would have produced most of 2011, if Libyan production had stayed on line, based on the amounts shown in its November Oil Market Report.

Demanding less: why we need a new politics of energy (report excerpt)

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For generations, human development has been fuelled by ever greater amounts of energy. The discovery of fire by our earliest ancestors allowed them to harness the energy stored in plants to keep warm and to cook. Agriculture is essentially a means of diverting sunlight into crops to provide easily accessible food. Farming liberated people from the daily hunt for sustenance, and allowed populations to grow. Exploitation of coal fuelled the industrial revolution and the development of urban societies. Oil for transport, and the development of electricity systems enabled modern society, with its ever increasing consumption and mobility. Energy use and social progress have been inextricably linked. Until now. Now, it makes sense to use less energy, not more.