Electricity

Just days before French President Nicolas Sarkozy urged attendees at a Paris energy conference to buy more nuclear power plants, a very different nuclear power conference was held in Potsdam, Germany. The Brookings Institution and the Global Public Policy Institute convened 35 people from governments, academia, think tanks, and industry to consider nuclear power's future. Craig Severance offers his own insights, and his conference presentation on why new nuclear power should undergo a rigorous business oriented "Due Diligence" process.

Driving down the broad avenues of Cleveland, Ohio, was like flipping through the pages of a picture book about the rise and fall of our industrial empire. Where demolitions had not removed things -- a lot was gone -- stood the residue of a society so different from ours that you felt momentarily transported to another planet where a different race of beings had gone about their business.

Many of us need nothing in the world so much as more time. Adding new projects is exhausting - and stressful. And yet, we know that there are things we want to change - for example, most of us would like to grow a garden with our kids, or make sure that we know where our food comes from. We'd like to live in communities with a greater measure of food security, we'd like to know more about what we're eating. We'd like to have more contact with nature, we'd like to be more self-sufficient. We'd like to have better food at lower cost, we'd like to have a reserve for an emergency or to share. We'd like to do more in our community and to eat with one another. We'd like to sit down to a home cooked meal more often.

At this juncture in the industrial age, we have two tired, one-armed lifeguards and a handful of victims. All eyes are on Greece -- fittingly, the birthplace of western civilization -- but Greece, which naturally turned to Goldman Sachs to try to hide its debt, is one tiny canary in a coal mine the size of Earth.

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)

Virtual worlds (World of Warcraft, Second Life) and the avatars that exist in them use energy. Often more than the average person in many countries of the world. Many IT pundits forget or ignore that computers are physical objects that require resources for their construction and maintenance and that they thus have an (under-explored) ecological footprint.

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.

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.

If one thinks of the vast amount of infrastructure the developed world has to maintain - buildings, roads, water, sewage, trash disposal, public safety, power and communications lines - one soon gets the idea that even a relatively short range electric vehicle is going to be an awful lot better than an oxcart in preserving and rebuilding the facilities we currently rely on for food and shelter during the next 100 years or so.

-Depletion of Key Resources: Facts at Your Fingertips
-Cities, peak oil, and sustainability
-Reconsidering Cities
-Peter Newman: The Crash, Peak Oil and Resilient Cities
-Where do we go from here?

First, we need a miraculous comprehensive substitute for crude oil. Then we need a miraculous removal of carbon from the atmosphere. We need the first miracle right now. We need the second within a generation.

Oil prices began the year with a rally, reaching nearly $84 a barrel as temperatures across much of the northern hemisphere required the heating to be turned up a notch.

In former times slaughterhouses, bakeries, breweries and dairies were small, numerous and more or less evenly distributed across the country. Today they are big and located in only a few places. They are hubs with many long transports going to and from them. This is a consequence of the relationship between the cost of energy versus the cost of labor.

A mid-week roundup of peak oil news, including:
-Prices and production
-Venezuela
-Iran

As ODAC News went to press, hopes of a deal in Copenhagen were finally rising, after two weeks of chaos and acrimony.