Biofuels – Feb 15
-America’s Food-To-Fuel Problem
-EU biofuels significantly harming food production in developing countries
-Burn Up the Biosphere and Call It Renewable Energy
-Palm oil deal ‘a threat to the rainforest’
Renewable Energy
Job Losses Push Need for Energy Bill
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)
Sustainable Firewood: Recycling Atmospheric Carbon
Wood is a renewable fuel because young trees grow up to replace those harvested for fuel. That’s a simple enough statement, but there is much more to consider when you look into the details.
The Challenge of Algal Fuel: Economic Processing of the Entire Algal Biomass
Micro-algae have considerable potential for the production of biofuel, but at present the process of producing fuel from algae would appear to be currently uneconomic. If fuel from micro-algae is to be economic the entire algal biomass should be utilised and anaerobic digestion could play an important part in the exploitation of algae to produce algal energy.
United States – Feb 8
-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
UK & Europe – Feb 8
-The population crash
-Getting connected: Europe’s green energy ‘supergrid’
-Pro-Moscow Yanukovych ‘to win Ukraine election’
Beyond Copenhagen – Now what?
Are current corporate-dominated international institutions inadequate to the task of meeting the multiple planetary survival challenges they themselves have helped create?…Richard Heinberg of the Post Carbon Institute (postcarbon.org), talks about the factors contributing to the stalemate in the Copenhagen climate summit, the other ‘game ending’ challenges confronting the current economic system, and the bottom-up steps necessary to move to a post-carbon economy.
ODAC Newsletter – Feb 5
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.
Entropy revisited
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.
Energy strategies, or the lack thereof – Feb 4
-How long before the lights go out?
-Peak Oil Theory: implications for Australia’s strategic outlook and the ADF
-The Iraqi Oil Conundrum
-A New Clean Economy — With Old Sources of Energy
-Business as Usual: Hooked on Foreign Oil
-Stop the Green Tech Coup, Military Industry on the Offensive
A thousand barrels a second by Tertzakian (2007) (review)
Peter Tertzakian has a double education in geophysics and economics and is “Chief Energy Economist” at a Canadian energy investment company. His book “A Thousand Barrels a Second: The Coming Oil Breakpoint and Challenges facing an energy dependent world” was published in 2007, but was, based on the contents of the book, presumably written up around 2005.
Biofuel pros and cons – Feb 3
-Shell stakes green future on sugar biofuel in $2bn Brazil venture
-Obama Set to Outline Biofuels Strategy
-Biofuel requirements for cars may help destroy the rainforest, watchdog says
-Biofuels: the Biggest Supply Response to the 2000s Oil Shock
