Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
I gave my first talk on peak oil in this room a little over two years ago. Like many people, when I first learned about it, I was very upset. I noted in my talk then that the problem looked serious and no one had any idea what to do. An Antioch attending said, “you should go to Cuba. They’ve already solved the problem.”
Biodiesel is all around us — in our ferries, buses, garbage trucks, passenger cars, tractors, Army trucks, sailboats and more — yet surveys show that only one in four people knows about this alternative, non-toxic fuel made from vegetable oil.
But biodiesel is poised for liftoff…
China has abruptly slowed and halted work on building 22 major dams
and power stations in a dramatic greening of the policies of the
world’s most populous nation.
As oppossed to an annual crop like corn, wood could offer a year-round source of ethanol, and still supply a feedstock for biomass thermal energy, or co-fired plants.
Brazil’s Ministry of Agriculture and the Japanese Bank for International Cooperation have signed the first phase of a term of reference for the future implementation of a bilateral biofuel program aimed at exporting ethanol and biodiesel fuel to the Japanese market.
It would seem that – in addition to Peak Oil – we are at a time of Peak Technology… there are no new technologies we can look to for solutions to the end of fossil fuels.
National grid boss Ralph Craven is predicting blackouts if the $500 million upgrading of transmission lines into Auckland is thwarted.
A recent Business Week article obscures hydrogen’s primary disadvantage: hydrogen is an energy intensive alternative to motor fuels derived from oil, argues Ronald Cooke, author of Oil, Jihad and Destiny.
The hydrogen economy is really a nuclear economy. Investors and the rest of corporate America may not realise how close the country is to making a gigantic bet on a nuclear future.
Struggling with rising oil prices, Pacific island nations are increasingly looking to coconut oil, long a basic foodstuff and massage lubricant, as an economically and ecologically sound petroleum alternative.
On the site where border guards used to keep watch on the western outpost of the Soviet Union, Baltic European Union newcomer Estonia is erecting a wind farm to generate clean electricity.
Journal paper quantifying the degree of
non-renewability of a major biofuel: ethanol produced from industrially-grown corn. Extensive work seriously challenging the right of this process to renewable status, on net energy, soil depletion, and government subidy-dependence grounds.
