Why a Bank Is Working to Debunk Climate Skeptics’ Arguments

There’s a reason Deutsche Asset Management cares about climate change. It’s going to drive huge investments. Well, I guess you can add Deutsche Asset Management – which handles very large sums of money for corporations, high net-worth individuals and other denizens of the most rarefied heights of market capitalism – to the stable of card-carrying […]

Drop the oilsands guilt trip: Canada’s not evil for its energy production, it’s resourceful – just like the U.S.

Every nation on Earth develops, uses, and if it’s lucky, exports the energy resources most readily available to it. Geography is not morality. Canada is developing the oilsands for the same reason the U.S. — the “Saudi Arabia of coal” according to Barack Obama — relies on the dirtiest of the fossil fuels to generate […]

The Earth Doesn’t Care About what is done to or for it

What humans do to, and ostensibly for, the earth does not matter in the long run, and the long run is what matters to the earth. We must, Laughlin says, think about the earth’s past in terms of geologic time. For example: The world’s total precipitation in a year is about one meter—“the height of […]

China’s one child policy may be relaxed: Overpopulation complexity

Chinese officials have begun launching pilot programs in five provinces that will ease the country’s one-child policy. Sources differ in the details, but It is expected that this shift in policy will be expanded in the coming years. USA Today reported that .The National Population and Family Planning Commission, which enforces the one-child policy, refused […]

IEA doubts oil market’s ‘respite’ will last

The oil market remains in a period of unusual calm that probably won’t last, says the International Energy Agency. “Crude prices have generally been range-bound in a $70-85/bbl groove since last October, OPEC production has been anchored close to 29 million b/d since last October, OPEC spare capacity has exceeded 5 million b/d since early […]

Stuart Staniford: Trend Break in Oil Supply

The enthusiastic professionals in Paris report that: Global oil supply fell 250 kb/d to 86.8 mb/d in August, as non-OPEC output dipped to 52.4 mb/d on seasonal maintenance in Canada, the UK and Russia. I’ve added that to the graph above (along with the OPEC data point I discussed yesterday). As often, the agencies don’t […]

Russia Inks $6 Billion Deal with China to Supply 475 Million Tonnes of Coal

Russia has agreed to supply China with 475 million tonnes of coal over the next 25 years. In a new deal between the two countries, China will provide Russia with a $6 billion loan to finance the development of several coal projects into large-scale mines. The announcement followed a conference on energy cooperation in Blagoveshchensk, […]

Is Peak Oil a Disaster or Are We Just Soft?

On the weekends my wife and I sometimes turn off our brains and watch hour after hour of disaster porn. As the giant comet, asteroid or alien ship appears in the skies, Americans look up from their handheld devices and people around the world run in panic. The Japanese are still in good shape thanks […]

Iran denies ‘secret atomic plant’

The People’s Mujahideen of Iran (PMOI) says it has satellite images of the facility, 120km (75 miles) from Tehran. But nuclear chief Ali Akbar Salehi insisted Iran had declared all of its activities to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). US officials said they knew about the plant but did not believe it had a […]

Peak Oil: Not Just for Conspiracy Theorists Anymore

I understand why people don’t listen to wild-eyed conspiracy theorists about the coming calamity of peak oil. Instead, they go to recognized experts like Daniel Yergin (author of The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money and Power), who tells them that everything is OK and the black gold will keep pumping for many decades […]

BP is pressing on with its relief well

BP will go ahead with plans to deliver a death blow to the blown-out well that spilled almost 5 million barrels of crude into the Gulf of Mexico even though findings in its own investigation of the disaster raise questions about whether the procedure is still needed. Although he has emphasized the Macondo well poses […]

Andrew Sullivan: Peak Oil, Meh

“Will it be the end of civilization?  No.  But surely dealing with the coming oil crisis is a major policy concern for all people across the political spectrum.” With some slight modifications, the post below is the letter I sent to both Andrew Sullivan and Reihan Salam yesterday in response to Salam’s post minimizing the […]

Why Oil Prices Aren’t Going Down

I saw a humorous story a few days ago: Oil Should Be Around $10 a Barrel The price of a barrel of oil would be closer to $10 if the commodity wasn’t traded as an investment instrument, given the record-high levels of U.S. oil inventories, Peter Beutel, president of Cameron Hanover, told CNBC Monday. “I […]

OPEC won’t dare to disturb the universe

To borrow from T. S. Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, why would OPEC bother to “dare disturb the universe”? The monthly Platts survey pegged total output from OPEC’s 12 members at 29.11 million b/d in August. OPEC’s own estimate, derived from secondary sources, is 29.147 million b/d. Both the Platts and OPEC estimates […]

A Look at the Peak Oil Belief – Is the End Really Near?

Until we explore the entire planet as carefully as we did Oklahoma and Texas, our assessment of global oil reserves will have plenty of room for surprises. _Vaclav Smil Repent, Sinners, The End is Near! Deeply held beliefs go beyond evidence and logic. Thus they tend to be unfalsifiable, invulnerable to demonstrable facts or reason. […]

Wind’s Future Ally: Better Transmission

The recent fossil fuel-funded attacks on wind power in the media make a lot of sense, given what wind energy has begun doing to the fossil fuels. To understand the impact of wind power on the U.S. electricity supply, it is necessary first to understand transmission and electricity markets. “That’s because of the interconnected nature of the […]

SciAm: How Much Global Warming Is Guaranteed

All the world’s power plants, vehicles and factories that presently exist may not emit enough carbon dioxide to cause catastrophic climate change Humanity has yet to reach the point of no return when it comes to catastrophic climate change, according to new calculations. If we content ourselves with the existing fossil-fuel infrastructure we can hold […]

China may relax its one-child rule

An aging population and the need for more workers have prompted China’s Communist Party to consider relaxing the decades-long ban that restricts most couples to one child, a harsh policy marked by forced abortions, sterilizations and fines for those who have more than one. In 2011, China will start pilot projects in five provinces, all […]

The Crisis Papers on DU – Fruit Flies in a Bottle

Place a few fruit flies in a bottle with a layer of honey at the bottom, and they will quickly multiply to an enormous number, and then, just as quickly, die off to the very last, poisoned by their wastes. Similarly, add a few yeast cells to grape juice, seal the bottle, and the cells […]

US electrical generation – Where we are now

Last week, Hannes Kunz and Nate Hagens put up one post talking about electricity, and they are planning another post in the near future. I thought now might be a good time to put up a few graphs regarding US electricity generation, showing where we are now. Most of the graphs are summaries of data […]

Are the Polar Ice Caps Melting Slower Than We Thought?

It’s one of the most pressing questions facing climate scientists today: how vulnerable are the vast ice caps on Greenland and Antarctica to rising temperatures? An unfathomable amount of ice is stored on those two land masses, and as that ice melts and flows into the oceans, global sea levels rise—if all the ice on […]

OPEC says oil demand could weaken over next few month

OPEC said September 9 global demand for oil could weaken over the remainder of this year as government stimulus packages are wound down, noting that the slowing economic recovery was already hitting growth in oil consumption. For now, though, the oil producer group expects world oil demand to continue growing at an annual rate of […]

Are some governments taking ‘peak oil’ seriously?

One of the arguments that some bring up in defense of alternative energy is that of “peak oil.” The idea behind peak oil is that, as a fossil fuel in limited supply, eventually we will reach a point where oil production hits its maximum capability — and then begins to decline. Because there aren’t endless […]

GreenTech PowerPoint Slides That Shook the Earth

If you attend enough cleantech events or are pitched by enough startups, you start to see the same few PowerPoint slides over and over again. Here is a collection of the best or at least the most notorious and historically significant slides in our industry. After publishing this list to an overwhelming response, we heard […]

Video: Deepwater Horizon & other Peak Oil Thoughts

KrisCan sits down with Chris Nelder, energy analyst and author of Profit From The Peak, to discuss the consequences of the U.S. shutting down domestic offshore drilling. In this first of seven video segments, he talks about the BP disaster in the Gulf and what the U.S. should have been doing with its energy policy […]

Water: Canada’s most valuable resource

Canadians will never go thirsty. With over one million lakes, including part ownership of the Great Lakes, and massive ice fields, Canada is home to nearly nine per cent of the world’s supply of fresh water. But with a population of less than one per cent of the world’s total, Canada has a lot of […]

What peak oil? Why an oil glut is ahead

In May, less than a month after the blowout of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico, a key milestone was achieved with little notice: Total U.S. supplies of petroleum and products refined from it (including the Strategic Petroleum Reserve) surpassed 1.8 billion barrels, reaching the highest level in the last 20 […]

Mexican drug cartels cripple Pemex operations in basin

LA Times The kidnappings of five petroleum company workers along with 30 others have terrorized the oil community, paralyzing segments of the business. Months later, families have still heard nothing. Reporting from Reynosa, Mexico — The meandering network of pipes, wells and tankers belonging to the gigantic state oil company Pemex have long been an […]

Coal and Oil: The Dark Monarchs of Global Energy

The formation of modern society has been dominated by coal and oil, and together these two fossil fuels account for nearly two thirds of all primary energy used by mankind. This makes future production a key question for future social development and this thesis attempts to answer whether it is possible to rely on an […]

Coal and Oil: The Dark Monarchs of Global Energy

The secretary of ASPO International Mikael Höök has now made his thesis public by using a nail and hammer and this ”nailing” is an old tradition at Uppsala University, Sweden. The thesis “Coal and Oil: The Dark Monarchs of Global Energy: Understanding Supply and Extraction Patterns and their Importance for Future Production” can be downloaded […]

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