Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
A U.S. federal judge has blocked the six-month moratorium on offshore oil drilling, just as more credence is being given to the notion that the Deepwater Horizon disaster has resulted in multiple leaks on the seafloor – due to well casing damage – making containment a munch lengthier process.
A midweek roundup of peak oil news, including:
-Prices and production
-Deepwater Horizon
On June 15th, in their testimony before the House Energy and Commerce Committee, the chief executives of America’s leading oil companies argued that BP’s Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico was an aberration — something that would not have occurred with proper corporate oversight and will not happen again once proper safeguards are put in place. This is fallacious, if not an outright lie.
BP’s oil disaster is partly the result of approaches to risk which lead us to believe we know more than we do.
In Ray Kurzweil’s future technological progress will proceed at a rate that represents the end of the human era and the beginning of one shared by humans and machines joined together and producing unimaginably rapid technological change. He and others refer to this point of transition as the technological singularity. This change, he believes, will enable humanity to overcome all of its most pressing problems: disease, hunger, climate change, resource scarcity, and, of course, death.
“For decades, we have known the days of cheap and easily accessible oil were numbered…”. These were the words of President Obama during his national address on the Gulf oil disaster from the Oval Office on Tuesday. Is the President accepting that we have reached peak oil?…
For some years — and long before the Gulf of Mexico spill — Big Oil has seemed to be in existential peril. These gargantuans have been starved of new resources and wrong-footed by state-owned oil companies like China’s Sinopec and Malaysia’s Petronas, which are also competing around the world for drilling rights. At stake has been not only Big Oil’s good health — after all, how many people really care whether Chevron or Shell thrive, apart from their shareholders? — but also the power of nations. It’s part of narrative of the rise of the East, and the decline of the West.
A midweek roundup of peak oil news, including:
-Prices and production
-Deepwater Horizon
In 2006 when I first met Julian Darley, author of _High Noon for Natural Gas_ and the founder of the Post-Carbon Institute, the world was excited by then-famous “Jack” oil field find in the Gulf of Mexico. Both of us were watching the way the world was interpreting the data – people were claiming that there might be 10, 12, 15 billion barrels of oil – five miles down underneath the ocean…Darley, framing the issue brilliantly, observed that “this isn’t salvation, this is digging around in the couch cushions for loose change.”
-After the credit crisis – next it will be oil
-Lloyd’s predicts BP disaster will prove oil industry’s Three Mile Island
-Talk of Second Oil Spill in Gulf Grows Louder
The GOM oil spew reinforces the extent to which Americans “just don’t get it” regarding
the unsustainable nature of our American way of life.
You have been warned. This is a politically incorrect article. In 1999, I read Jane Goodall’s book, Reason for Hope, which took the optimistic view that, in spite of human activity, our beautiful blue planet is very resilient. She lists nature’s resiliency as her third reason for hope, the others being the human brain, the indomitable human spirit, and the determination of young people.
