Technology

OPEC ministers meeting in Vienna this week caused no surprises in deciding to keep production quotas unchanged. Saudi oil minister Ali Al-Naimi described current prices as "beautiful". Indeed as the group met the oil price rose to $82/barrel, close to its 2010 high despite only 53% compliance by OPEC to its quotas and low US demand.

What do you do if you're an energy consultancy that finds itself on the wrong side of the peak oil argument just as much of the oil industry and the rest of the world embraces the idea? The solution devised by eternal optimists IHS CERA, hosting a conference in Houston this week, is to sidestep this embarrassing development by simply rebranding the problem: 'peak demand'.

-US EPA chief concerned about gas drilling fluids
-Europe the new frontier in shale gas rush
-The true cost of shale gas production
-The Natural Gas Shopping Spree Quickens

-Fury as EU approves GM potato
-France blasts GM crop approvals by EU agency
-Are GMOs the ‘financial innovations’ of agriculture?
-GM and farming technology 'key to fighting climate change'

Oil supply optimists claim that new technology combined with private development of the world's remaining oil resources--most of which are now under the control of government-owned companies--would vastly increase global oil production and put off any decline for decades. Texas oilman Jeffrey Brown isn't buying it, and he cites the history of oil production in Texas and the North Sea to explain why.

Bill Gates is right that we need more funding, support, and attention applied to energy technology. But if we truly seek to fashion a sustainable future, we need just as much applied to laws, regulations, infrastructure, economics, behaviors, and values. We need to innovate a new way of being in the world, not just new tools.

President Obama has issued marching orders for the rapid national adoption of "clean coal" technology. Last week, shortly after his budget address, he ordered a high-level task force to deliver a plan within 180 days determining how "to overcome barriers to the widespread, cost-effective deployment of CCS within 10 years, with the goal of bringing 5 to 10 commercial demonstration projects on line by 2016."

Derek's book is a far cry from anything so conventional. He aims to inspire with his ideas, ideas that may well earn his book a place in tiny house history. What he ends up doing is reconstructing the mind into accepting what constitutes shelter. (Also "Build Your Own House")

There is Successful Farming, Progressive Farming, Organic Farming, Natural Farming and an awful lot of Wishful Farming. I would like to add to the list one more kind: Impossible Farming.

-Defusing the Methane Greenhouse Time Bomb
-Think-tanks take oil money and use it to fund climate deniers
-China: Prince of Denmark
-Loss Of Species Hits Economy

- The Making of an Elder Culture
- Slow-tech: Manifesto for an overwound world
- Stuck accelerators: Toyotas and the fossil-fuel growth economy
- Energy flow, emergent complexity, and collapse

Jeff Rubin, former chief economist at Canadian investment bank CIBC World Markets, is not your typical economist. He gets peak oil...And now, in his bestselling book Why Your World Is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller, he argues that oil prices, temporarily dampened by the deepest post-war recession on record, will soon be vaulted to new highs as the economy begins to recover, which in turn will thrust the world into yet another recession right on the heels of this one.

This week saw the Chairman of one of the world’s major oil companies publicly acknowledge the approaching peak in oil production...

The American West at Risk's 13 chapters examine some of the major human-caused environmental problems now threatening the 11 contiguous Western states...Citing trustworthy, peer-reviewed studies in support of its arguments, and written by three trained scientists, this book has every claim for credibility—and is an enlightening and gripping read for scientists and laypeople alike.

"as mankind proceeded to get bigger and bigger we silently crossed a threshold"