Resource alarms and responses – Mar 1
-Spain adopts energy saving measures to combat oil price hike
-China pollution ‘threatens growth’
-Denmark Targets Fossil-Fuel Independence Through Wind, Biogas
Renewable Energy
The corn ultimatum
In a world of blatantly increasing food insecurity — driven by population, dietary trends, rising oil prices, and growing climate instability — America’s policy of burning one third of our corn crop in our engines (soon to be 37% or more) is becoming increasingly untenable, if not unconscionable.
Are more people turning to wood heating?
The opening paragraph of some newspaper and magazine articles about wood heating make the claim that more households are burning wood due to the high cost of conventional energy sources. This assumption is logical enough considering there is plenty of income insecurity and increasing costs lately. But a review of the few available sources of statistics calls this conclusion into question.
My congressman has selective science disorder
Fred Upton been much in the news of late as chairman of the Committee on Energy and Commerce of the U.S. House of Representatives. He told us as recently as April 24, 2009 that “climate change is a serious problem that necessitates serious solutions.” But now that he has finally gotten a little power, he has contracted selective science disorder.
Peak oil, climate change, political turmoil: the lesson from Egypt
Were the Egyptian people that bravely took to the streets to overthrow a tyrannical regime taking part in the world’s first peak oil revolution?
Earth’s Limits: Why Growth Won’t Return
The 2008 crude oil price, $147 per barrel, shattered the global economy. The “invisible hand” of economics became the invisible fist, pounding down world economic growth to match the limitations of crude oil production.—Kenneth Deffeyes (petroleum geologist). An excerpt from Chapter 3 of Richard Heinberg’s upcoming book The End of Growth.
Preface to a Prelude to Peak Oil
Prelude may be the first thriller novel explicitly about peak oil (numberless thrillers concern the nefarious machinations of international oil conglomerates — ultimately those are stories about peak oil too). It follows a short period in the life and career of Cassie Young, an oil industry analyst based in Washington, DC.
ODAC Newsletter – Feb 11
Saudi Arabia’s recoverable oil reserves may have been overstated by 40%. That was the warning sent to Washington from its embassy in Riyadh in 2007, according to a cable released by Wikileaks this week. The source was Sadad al-Husseini, former head of E&P at Saudi Aramco, who allegedly told US diplomats in Riyadh that Saudi’s claimed reserves of some 700bn bbls were overinflated by 300 billion barrels of ‘speculative resources’, and that output would peak once the kingdom had produced half of its original proven reserves of 360bn barrels. With 116bn produced so far, the diplomats concluded that on this basis Saudi’s peak could come in the early 2020s.
Growth of wood biomass power stokes concern on emissions
The only way that biomass achieves carbon neutrality is if growing forests sequester — that is, absorb from the atmosphere — as much or more carbon dioxide than is released in the burning process…It takes only seconds to burn a tree’s worth of wood, and decades for that tree to grow back and sequester the same amount of carbon.
Energy funds, energy flows
The recent report from World Wildlife Fund insisting that the world can transition to renewable energy while maintaining current developed world lifestyles and abolishing Third World poverty is simply one more in a long series of loudly heralded cornucopian fantasies well detached from the hard realities of the industrial world’s predicament. The sheer amounts of cheap energy that modern civilization has to hand has blinded too many people to the fact that “vast” and “infinite” are not synonyms — and that blindness has significant implications for the near future.
To ‘Frack’ or not to ‘Frack’?
Ohio, the home of John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil, and site of the world’s largest oil-producing provinces in the late 19th century, is again at the center of the action in domestic fossil fuel production as a controversial drilling technique, known as fracking, is draining Ohio’s remaining oil and gas reserves. With global oil production peaking and the number of new large oil finds dwindling, is increased domestic production in Ohio and other states through fracking a vital contribution to our energy security, or a fate to be fought?
Review: Localisation and Resilience by Rob Hopkins
The dissertation is a case study of the first official Transition Town, the English market town of Totnes, long a popular tourist destination known for its alternative culture. Using interviews, focus groups, questionnaire surveys and other social science research methods, the study examines the degree to which the Transition ideals of localization and resilience have become a reality in Totnes. (Transitioners endorse a number of upbeat definitions of a resilient community, a popular one being “[a] culture based on its ability to function indefinitely and to live within its own limits, and able to thrive for having done so.”*)
