Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
“Because money talks and BS walks, if the hydrogen economy was an apprentice working for Donald Trump, it would’ve been fired in the first season.” This is just one of the pearls of wisdom from Transition Voice’s new “Snarky Guide to Peak Oil.” It’s got the facts you need to debunk energy myths and the attitude you need to defuse a heated discussion with a smile.
On June 6 and 7, I attended Opal Financial’s Clean and Green Investment Forum. I was invited to take part in a panel on “Green Energy in Emerging and Frontier Markets”. The forum brought together clean tech entrepreneurs and investors as well as a few academics and analysts and proved very stimulating. The overall vibe was one of optimism and opportunity — we’re talking entrepreneurs and investors here.
Dubbed French version of Dubbed French version of the PCI video ‘300 Years of FOSSIL FUELS in 300 Seconds’. L’histoire humaine des 300 dernières années dont le développement repose sur les énergies fossiles.
Promoters of big centralized power generation schemes often justify their plans by invoking economies of scale. That logic made sense at a time when economic expansion and abundant resource supplies defined the framework for all economic activity, electricity generation very much included; in a post-abundance world, what were once economies could very easily turn into something else.
-UK ministers ignored ‘peak oil’ warnings, report shows
-Senate Rejects Effort to Cut Ethanol Subsidy
-Soot, smog curbs quick way to combat warming: U.N. study
Get energy independence (and help the climate too!) Two interviews with off-grid authors who have walked the walk, living outside the power grid, with a minimum of fossil fuels. Where to start with solar, heat pumps, hot water heat, wind or wood. Cam Mather from aztext.com, living in comfort – off grid 14 years. From the UK, Nick Rosen author of “Off the Grid” at off-grid.net.
Traditional price hawks Iran and Venezuela ganged up with Libya, Algeria, Angola, Ecuador, Venezuela and Iraq to defeat the increase, proposed by Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Kuwait and Qatar, with voting largely determined by the distribution of spare capacity.
One key component of the Plan B climate stabilization strategy is solar energy. Solar is even more ubiquitous than wind energy and can be harnessed with both solar photovoltaics (PV) and solar thermal collectors.
Recent suggestions that the current boom in natural gas will be a bridge to a future of sustainable energy are highly reminiscent of similar claims from the past — claims that turned out to be entirely wrongheaded. A bridge is only useful if there’s somewhere to get to on the other side, and in the future ahead of us, the other side will inevitably be defined by much less energy use. With the help of a photovoltaic panel, the Archdruid explains.
Chancellor Angela Merkel surprised many with her May 30 announcement of a complete shut down of all Germany’s reactors by January 1st, 2022 and the shutdown of 14 of Germany’s total of 17 reactors well before that date. The German chancellor has, in nine months, gone from touting nuclear plants as a safe “bridge” to renewable energy and easing regulatory constraints on extending reactor lifetimes, to pushing the biggest and fastest nuclear exit strategy in any country using nuclear power.
– Floating LNG: The Final Frontier Of The Gas Age
– GE Sees Solar Cheaper Than Fossil Power in Five Years
– Jolt of energy is bringing landfill mining to life
I’m not popular with environmentalists when I tell them that renewables can only provide a small fraction of the energy that fossil fuels do in powering industrial civilization. In fact, I was recently called a liar at the screening of an anti-nuke film for suggesting so.
