Peak oil notes – Feb 11
A midweek roundup of peak oil news, including:
-Prices and production
-The Iranian situation
-Asia still growing
-UK Industry Task Force on Peak Oil and Energy Security: 2010 Update
A midweek roundup of peak oil news, including:
-Prices and production
-The Iranian situation
-Asia still growing
-UK Industry Task Force on Peak Oil and Energy Security: 2010 Update
Millions of job losses are pushing the U.S. Senate to consider a Jobs and Energy bill, even though Cap and Trade appears to be on life support. What are Five Key Measures that must be in a new Bill to avoid being a “half-ass..d” effort? (term from Sen. Lindsey Graham descrbing limited climate bill)
On 10 February 2010 at the Royal Society, six UK companies – Arup, Foster + Partners, Scottish and Southern Energy, Solarcentury, Stagecoach Group and Virgin – joined together to launch the second report of the UK Industry Task-Force on Peak Oil and Energy Security (ITPOES).
-Sanctions Are the Talk of the Day
-U.S. Wants Iran Sanctions In Weeks; Embassies Attacked
-Iran begins enriching higher-grade uranium, says state TV
-False Profits: We Will Be Suffering from Greenspan and Bernanke’s Ineptitude for a Long Time
-G7 close to accord on banks paying for global recession
-How Brussels Is Trying to Prevent a Collapse of the Euro
-Europe loses seat at top table
-Corruption, Culpability and Short-Termism
-What’s Missing from the New Clean Energy Agenda?
-Soaring cost of healthcare sets a record
-America Is Not Yet Lost
-Seven States of Energy Debt
-The population crash
-Getting connected: Europe’s green energy ‘supergrid’
-Pro-Moscow Yanukovych ‘to win Ukraine election’
-Defusing the Methane Greenhouse Time Bomb
-Think-tanks take oil money and use it to fund climate deniers
-China: Prince of Denmark
-Loss Of Species Hits Economy
-Fears of ‘Lehman-style’ tsunami as crisis hits Spain and Portugal
-G7 tries to ease fears over Greek contagion
-Europe On The Brink
In a busy week for energy policy, UK energy watchdog Ofgem finally acknowledged what has been obvious for years: that liberalized markets cannot deliver energy security in the era of carbon reduction and resource depletion.
One way of looking at our current set of predicaments is that we’ve been on a binge, consuming energy considerably faster than it can be captured and stored by Earth’s ecosystems. While fossil fuels once appeared limitless (and still do to deniers of peak oil), and though we’re literally bathed in energy (in the form of sunlight), the disappearance of the fossil-fuel storehouse accumulated over millions of years isn’t something that can be replaced with anything nearly as convenient as fossil fuels.
For decades now, those concerned with the future of the industrial world have warned that a point would come, sooner or later, when the consequences of all that short-term thinking would begin coming home to roost. For the United States, that point might be arriving now.