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Peak Oil Review - May 21

Tom Whipple, ASPO-USA

A weekly review including:
-Oil and the Global Economy
-The EU Crisis
-Iran
-Quote of the Week
-Briefs

archived May 21, 2012

How the fracking mess is about to make the mortgage mess worse

Kurt Cobb, Resource Insights

One fact ought to tell you all you need to know about the risks faced by homeowners signing leases for natural gas drilling on their property: Wells Fargo & Company, both the largest home mortgage lender in the United States and a major lender to the country's second largest producer of natural gas, Chesapeake Energy Corp., refuses to make home loans for properties encumbered with natural gas drilling leases.

archived May 20, 2012

Oil report from the ”Diplomatic Council on Energy Security”

Kjell Aleklett, Aleklett's Energy Mix

It feels as though we now have the first informed American report on the oil issue. One is struck by how well they describe the problem that ASPO and my research group have attempted to raise awareness of during the last 10 years. That this group of Americans perceive reality in a different way than is common in the USA is presumably because they are diplomats who have been outside the USA’s borders and have studied their nation from a different perspective.

archived May 20, 2012

Thoughts on Richard Heinberg’s book "The End of Growth"

Calvin Sloan, Con Carlitos

Sounding the alarm early is far better than not sounding the alarm at all. In fact, those who do are the true pioneers of ecological conciousness. Heinberg may be early, or he may not be, yet he has engaged us all in a very necessary conversation, arguably the most important conversation my generation will have in our lifetimes.

archived May 18, 2012

Poisoning people in Apollo: all in a day’s work

Michael D. Yates, Cheap Motels and Hot Plates

Apollo is a small town in western Pennsylvania, part of the old coal and steel belt that surrounds Pittsburgh. The people who grew up there have learned what harm the corporations who employed them and their relatives and friends have done and continue to do. Men, women, and children were poisoned by that uranium fuel plant and that glass plant. Yet, for the most part, they ignore this, content to contemplate instead their “warm and fuzzy” memories, as one person put it.

archived May 19, 2012

The shadow of fascism

Damien Perrotin, The view from Brittany

Our capacity to bring about collective change decreases with every passing year – at least the kind of collective change the French people can accept. It is quite possible to simplify the French society, but that means accepting, even embracing, poverty, not something we as a people are likely to do.

Authoritarianism is therefore bound to fail, and become more and more authoritarian with time as, unlike democracy, failure is not something it can accept. Its normal way of dealing with it is not handing power to the other side, but finding somebody to blame.

archived May 18, 2012

Oil - May 18

Staff, Energy Bulletin

-Dump the pump: could peak oil be voluntary?
-Shell's Majnoon deal highlights Iraq oil target verdict
-Insight - Peak, pause or plummet? Shale oil costs at crossroads

archived May 18, 2012

ODAC Newsletter - May 18

Staff, Oil Depletion Analysis Centre

The prospect of weaker oil demand in the face of the Euro crisis was balanced this week by warnings from the IEA and Saudi Arabia. Sadad al-Husseini, the former head of Exploration and Production at Saudi Aramco, wrote that "$100 for Brent is quite a correction and it will be a challenge to sustain such a low price beyond the short term"...

archived May 18, 2012

Peak oil notes - May 17

Tom Whipple, ASPO-USA

A midweekly roundup of peak oil news, including:
-Developments this week

archived May 17, 2012

Resilience or death: Preparing our farms for the end of agriculture (…as we know it)

Dan Allen, Energy Bulletin

No civilization has ever faced the agricultural challenges confronting us over the coming decades. Ever. And if we can pull it off – wherever we CAN pull it off – it will necessarily be with an agriculture of maximum resilience; an agriculture that can get knocked down and stagger back up again and again and again. So let’s do this.

archived May 16, 2012

Energy and peak oil - May 17

Staff, Energy Bulletin

- Can we please just declare the end of 'peak oil' and start worrying about something important?
- The U.S. Has A Lot Of Shale Oil, So What?
- Chevron VP: Technology can unlock new fields, curb fears of peak oil
- The Biggest Threat to High Oil Prices
- Amory Lovins: A 50-year plan for energy (video)
- U.S. energy independence is no longer just a pipe dream

archived May 17, 2012

The twilight of protest

John Michael Greer, The Archdruid Report

It's become common to see activists rejecting, often with quite a bit of heat, the suggestion that they might want to embrace in their own lives the changes they hope to get the rest of the world to adopt. In the twilight years of American empire, that's a very convenient attitude, but it deprives peak oil and environmental activists of a tool that worked remarkably well the last time it was tried, and closes off avenues for shaping the future that might be better kept open.

archived May 17, 2012

Jeffrey Brown responds to "U.S. energy independence is no longer just a pipe dream"

Jeffrey J. Brown, Energy Bulletin

"It's no pipe dream. The U.S. is already the world's fastest-growing oil and natural gas producer. Counting the output from Canada and Mexico, North America is "the new Middle East," Citigroup analysts declare in a recent report."

Jeffrey Brown responds: The Texas Railroad Commission (RRC) sums the reported production from Texas producers, and it has been doing so far decades, while the EIA apparently uses a sampling approach to estimate Texas production. For annual production in 2011, the RRC shows Texas crude oil production at 1.12 mbpd (million barrels per day), while the EIA shows it at 1.46 mbpd, a gap of 340,000 bpd. The gap between the RRC and the EIA for monthly production is even more pronounced, on the order of about 500,000 to 600,000 bpd.

If the EIA is this far off for Texas, what about the other producing states, and what does it say about the EIA's global data?

archived May 16, 2012

Shale gas - May 16

Staff, Energy Bulletin

-Familiar echoes in shale gas boom
-'Fracking' risks found to have been diminished (Report)
-Medical Records Could Yield Answers On Fracking
-Water safe in town made famous by fracking-EPA
-Shale causes rise in waste gas pollution
-Obama Warms to Energy Industry by Supporting Natural Gas

archived May 16, 2012

Spectral Extravaganza: The Ultimate Light

Tom Murphy, Do the Math

What do you get when you cross an astronomically-inclined physicist with concerns over energy efficiency in lighting? Spectra. Lots and lots of spectra. In this post, we’ll become familiar with spectral characterization of light, see example spectra of a number of household light sources, and I’ll even throw in some mind-blowing photos. In the process, we’ll evaluate just how efficient lighting could possibly be, along the way understanding something about the physiology of light perception and the definition of the increasingly ubiquitous lighting measure called the lumen. Buckle your physics seat-belt and prepare to think like a photon.

archived May 16, 2012

Oil - May 16

Staff, Energy Bulletin

- Peak oil debate is over, says Total chief
- Oil Falls to 2012 Low on Greek Debt, Saudi Call for Drop
- Reuters global energy and envrionment summit

archived May 16, 2012

Oil and water— drilling stirs new concerns in Ohio

Megan Quinn Bachman, Yellow Springs News

In the late 1800s northwestern Ohio was at the center of an oil boom as the state became the nation's largest crude producer. Today Ohio is at the center of another fossil fuel boom, where a new drilling method — hydraulic fracturing (fracking) combined with modern horizontal drilling — is releasing natural gas from deep underground shale, leading to a rush of new leases. Is drilling safe or are contamination concerns unfounded?

archived May 30, 2012

Tom Murphy: Time to be honest with ourselves about our looming energy risks

Chris Martenson, chrismartenson.com

Tom uses simple, easy-to-understand math -- yes, that four-letter word -- to logically -- I say quite logically -- make the case that simply extrapolating past trends in energy and economic growth is not going to cut it. Instead, we face gigantic challenges and significant risks to our current model. Not least of which is, when asked what we will use when fossil fuels dwindle away, the most typical answer is I’m sure we will think of something. That is, our future of energy is a question mark right now.

archived May 15, 2012

Free energy does not occur in nature

Barath Raghavan, contraposition

It's not just that what we generally think of as free energy doesn't occur in nature, but also that free energy does occur in the everyday lived environments of people in industrial nations, which we might thus say are unnatural. So what are instances of free energy that we experience in our lives, and why do they matter?

archived May 15, 2012

U.S. coal generation drops 19 percent in one year, leaving coal with 36 percent share of electricity

Stephen Lacey, Climate Progress

Power generation from coal is falling quickly. According to new figures from the U.S. Energy Information Administration, coal made up 36 percent of U.S. electricity in the first quarter of 2012 -- down from 44.6 percent in the first quarter of 2011. That stunning drop, which represented almost a 20 percent decline in coal generation over the last year, was primarily due to low natural gas prices. As EIA explains, natural gas generation will climb steadily this year, while coal will see a double-digit drop by the end of 2012...

archived May 15, 2012

related news:

Food industry named world’s worst

Wayne Roberts, Wayne Robert's blog

Dangerously low levels of sustainability in the food industry may skyrocket to the top of the to-do and worry-about lists of business executives, government officials, and perhaps even environmentalists and shoppers.

archived May 18, 2012

Transition Money – the need to scale up and get real

Shaun Chamberlain, Dark optimism

Could we really feel that the Transition movement's responses were adequate in the face of the suffering being inflicted by the crisis? Would speaking of local currencies feel sufficient in comforting the family of the pensioner who shot himself in front of the Greek Parliament last month after his pension was cut to nothing (described by Greeks not as suicide, but as "financial murder")?

Transitioning Money means building narratives and economic structures that empower people to step away from the crumbling mainstream and learn to trust in each other again, instead of in money.

archived May 18, 2012

Occupying the Future, Starting at the Roots

Diana Pei Wu, PhD, Urban Habitat / Race, Poverty & Environment

“In the first world, we have been fed a false sense of security that is imploding,” says Michelle Mascarenhas-Swan, recounting her family’s experience with the militant experiment in collective governance and self-sufficiency. “On Earth Day, our families were a part of manifesting a collective vision for a better way forward—that the land be a community educational center. We have planted strawberries in the children’s garden and feed the chickens with snails that we collect from our own garden. My partner, a cook, brings us food regularly. We are making that vision real.”

archived May 17, 2012

Conceptualizing post-capitalist economics

Stuart Jeanne Bramhall, Dissident Voice

Sacred Economics: Money, Gift and Society in the Age of Transition by Charles Eisenstein is a well-researched discussion of the history of money, capitalist economics and the worldwide movement for economic relocalization. Part I explores the profound effect the institution of money has on human thinking and psychology, as well as direct links between our monetary system, the current economic crisis and the impending global ecological crisis. Parts II and III explore possible alternatives to a debt-based monetary system that has outlived its usefulness.

archived May 18, 2012

How small groups can power big change

Sarah Byrnes, YES! Magazine

As a nation, we seem to be constantly better at keeping each other at a distance. That means we aren’t so good at the skills required to live in community and use consensus: real listening, compromise, self-awareness, personal reflection. In this context, it’s radical simply to try and make connections with each other—to get closer rather than farther apart.

archived May 18, 2012

My town in Transition (transcription)

Rob Hopkins, Transition Culture

My role in Transition started in 2005 when a friend and myself started showing some films about peak oil, about the idea that we are reaching the end of an age of cheap energy and all that that has made possible. We’re entering a time of increasingly volatile energy prices and that what we need to do with focus, determination, optimism and a sense of possibility is design the way that we’re going to get away from that.

When we started, I was imagined it was an environmental thing. More and more I see it as a cultural thing. [Transcription of a TEDx Talk]

archived May 18, 2012

Deep thought - May 17

Staff, Energy Bulletin

-The Barcode moment, Part 1
-Learning To Love A Wounded World
-It's all right

archived May 17, 2012

Circulation and circularity

Molly Scott Cato, Gaian Economics

I was really cheered to see a comment on my post about the need to understand the economy as a complex system, pulling me up for not mentioning the limitations of a Keynesian approach in an era of ecological crisis. I covered this point in my earlier post 'A green paradox of thrift', but I am still encouraged to know that the no-growth position is now so established that people are reminding me about it!

archived May 17, 2012

The commons law project: A vision of green governance

David Bollier, David Bollier blog

For the past two years or more, I’ve been working on a major research and writing project to try to recover from the mists of history the bits and pieces of what might be called “commons law” (not to be confused with common law). Commons law consists of those social practices, cultural traditions and specific bodies of formal law that recognize the rights of commoners to manage their own resources. Most of these governance traditions deal with natural resources such as farmland, forests, fisheries, water and wild game. Commons law has existed in many forms, and in many cultures, over millennia.

archived May 17, 2012

Mobile slaughterhouses help meat go local

Katherine Gustafson, Yes! Magazine

Bruce Dunlop was an engineer before he became a farmer on a picturesque island off the coast of Washington in 2002. This technical background turned out to serve him well in producing pork and lamb to sell from Lopez Island Farm. Faced with the financial and logistical difficulty of transporting his live animals 200 miles to the closest USDA-permitted slaughterhouse on the mainland—a trip that included a 45-minute ferry ride—he began designing the nation’s first mobile slaughterhouse, in cooperation with Washington State University extension and Lopez Community Land Trust.

archived May 17, 2012

The Social Factor in Sustainable Architecture

Marcin Gerwin, Permaculture Research Institute of Australia

I was recently struck by photographs of energy-efficient houses that were described as ’sustainable’ — built mostly with natural or recycled materials and even finished with environmentally friendly paint — however, they looked like regular modernist buildings. Can modernist architecture be called sustainable, if only ecological techniques are used? Or, is there still something missing?

archived May 15, 2012

When the experiment fails

Charlotte Du Cann, Transition Network

Celebrating Failure is perhaps the least understood ingredient in the book. Because we live in a culture of success. No matter how we talk about losing being part of the game, it's still losing. Victors take all, stand on the podium crowned with laurels, king of the castle, biggest banker on the block. No one wants to be in the beaten team, on the bottom of the pecking order. But to be in Transition means we have to understand this win-or-lose mindset as an old order we need to transform.

archived May 16, 2012

Food & agriculture - May 17

Staff, Energy Bulletin

-Fruit and vegetable community co-ops rise to 350 in Wales
-Quantifying Urban Agriculture Impacts, One Tomato at a Time
-The Edible City

archived May 16, 2012

It's the system, Stupid!

Molly Scott Cato, Gaian Economics

So the Eurozone is on the brink of slipping back into Recession. The latest growth figures indicate the growing inequality that the single currency is causing between Europe's countries. The quaterly rates of growth range from -1.3% in Hungary to +1.3% in Finland. Meanwhile, annual rates of growth in 2012 compared with the same quarter in 2011 are truly shocking. Greece is showing a contraction of 6.2%, while the Portuguese economy contracted by 2.2%. The Netherlands shrank by 1.3%, while the UK is registering at zero. In the case of Greece, Spain and the countries that are showing disturbing rates of contraction, the austerity measures are the key cause of this. The failure to understand this appears to be wilful stupidity.

archived May 16, 2012

On construction, cake, and local economic regeneration: why we should start with the materials

Rob Hopkins, Transition Culture

Could it be that we could create new housing, and new work spaces in such a way that each new development produces houses that lock up a lot of carbon in terms of their materials, generate very little carbon during their inhabitation, which create a diversity of new enterprises and livelihoods, show what deep public consultation in relation to development really looks like, all kinds of trainings, opportunities for people to invest in and benefit from the development, which create a huge sense of excitement and anticipation, invites the local community to get involved at regular stages and which create buildings and developments that feel timeless, rather than bound to a particular short-lived era of architectural fashion? I think so.

archived May 16, 2012

Why such a lack of common sense about dogs?

Gene Logsdon, The Contrary Farmer, Mulligan Books & Seeds

The kind of society that thinks its okay to let dogs lick children on the lips is the same society that wants to tell farmers how to raise livestock. Granted that some farm practices are unnecessarily cruel to animals and need to be changed, the kind of mind that allows face-licking dogs should be humble enough to listen to what farmers have to say too about animal care. I have dehorned calves, docked lambs, castrated pigs, scraped maggots out of a sheep’s hide, punctured a hole in a bloated cow with a pocketknife to save its life, and watched my wife sew up animal wounds with darning needle and thread. I will be blistered for saying this, but I must stand by my experience. Animal pain and discomfort is not like what humans feel.

archived May 16, 2012

Against the crisis: P2P Industrial Revolution!

David de Ugarte, El Correo de las Indias

Today, the levers of Macroeconomics, the economic devices traditionally used as control levers for national economies, are broken or blocked.

It's time to start up new strategies with new content and media, set in a new scale, the human scale.

archived May 16, 2012

Back to the Land for the Occupy Movement

Jeff Conant, On the Commons

In the scant three weeks that Occupy the Farm persisted as a physical occupation, it expanded the tactics, objectives, and vision of the Occupy Movement; it restored the frontlines of a local struggle to get the University of California to respond to community needs rather than corporate interests; it took an issue that is generally only spoken of in the so-called ‘Third World’ – that of food sovereignty and territorial rights – and dropped it into the heart of the urban San Francisco Bay Area; and, it asserted, in the flesh, a demand that many progressives have spoken of in recent years, but few have had sufficient vision, understanding or bravery to manifest: Occupy the Farm was, and is, a bold, largely unprecedented act of reclaiming the Commons in the most immediate sense – taking land out of private speculation and putting it into community use.

archived May 16, 2012

Environment - May 16

Staff, Energy Bulletin

- WWF Report: Consumption of Earth's resources unsustainable
- Monthly Review: Marx’s ecology and the understanding of land cover change
- New report from Club of Rome warns about humanity’s ability to survive without a major change in direction
- The Big Fix: documentary exposes BP, U.S. Gov't on Gulf disaster/Interview: the Tickells, filmmakers
- James Hansen: Game Over for the Climate

archived May 16, 2012