July 31, 2010
George Lakoff
Author, The Political Mind, Moral Politics, Don’t Think of an Elephant!

Posted: July 15, 2010 09:08 AM
Huffington Post

Saving nature is the central issue. Carbon fuels destroy nature. The Gulf Death Gusher is the most visible sign. But signs are everywhere. Overall global warming increases hurricanes and floods, destroys habitats for plants, fish, birds, and ground animals, spreads deserts, causes deadly waves, and destroys glaciers and our polar ice caps. The use of carbon fuels has been destroying nature. Our job now is to save it.

Interestingly, there is a short, 39-page bill before the Senate that would allow us to save nature and get paid substantially for doing it. It is the CLEAR bill, first suggested by Peter Barnes, and introduced by Maria Cantwell (D-WA) and Susan Collins (R-ME). It is simple, it works, and it pays you!

The principle behind it is this: We US citizens own the air over the US equally. Carbon-fuel sellers are dumping pollution in our air, not just poisoning the air, but destroying nature. At least they should pay for permits to dump, poison, and destroy, and should be forced year-by-year to stop. Who should the sellers pay for permits? All of us, the citizens who live here, should be paid handsomely. And there should be predictably fewer permits every year, till the practice ends or reaches tolerable levels. Read the complete Post.

By Peter Goodchild

18 July, 2010
Countercurrents.org

Most people have enough trouble dealing with the reality of peak oil. It’s like being married to someone who says, “I’m not an alcoholic, I just sometimes drink too much.” But perhaps to soften the blow, or maybe just to simplify the numbers, what is generally left out is the fact that it’s not really peak oil that matters, anyway, but peak oil per capita, the date of which was 1979. In that year there were 5.5 barrels of oil available for each person on Earth; by 2009 it had gone down to 4.3. [2]

In terms of daily life, however, it is that per-capita figure that is most critical. Because everything in modern civilization is tied to oil, everything in our world has deteriorated since 1979. It’s possible to use various numerical data to prove that the standard of living has gone down since that year, and to tie that to increased costs that in turn originate in the decrease of oil per capita, but it’s also just something we feel in our bones. If we look back over any ten-year period during the last four decades, we can see and feel the difference. Read the complete Post.

The New York Times

June 5, 2010
Imagining Life Without Oil, and Being Ready
By JOHN LELAND

As oil continued to pour into the Gulf of Mexico on a recent Saturday, Jennifer Wilkerson spent three hours on the phone talking about life after petroleum.

For Mrs. Wilkerson, 33, a moderate Democrat from Oakton, Va., who designs computer interfaces, the spill reinforced what she had been obsessing over for more than a year — that oil use was outstripping the world’s supply. She worried about what would come after: maybe food shortages, a collapse of the economy, a breakdown of civil order. Her call was part of a telephone course about how to live through it all.

In bleak times, there is a boom in doom.

Americans have long been fascinated by disaster scenarios, from the population explosion to the cold war to global warming. These days the doomers, as Mrs. Wilkerson jokingly calls herself and likeminded others, have a new focus: peak oil. They argue that oil supplies peaked as early as 2008 and will decline rapidly, taking the economy with them.

Located somewhere between the environmental movement and the bunkered survivalists, the peak oil crowd is small but growing, reaching from health food stores to Congress, where a Democrat and a Republican formed a Congressional Peak Oil Caucus. Read the complete Post.

RICHARD GILBERT

staff writer

Enbridge Inc. has filed an application with the National Energy Board (NEB) for the construction of the multi-billion dollar Northern Gateway oil pipeline, which is being opposed by another major pipeline company, as well as some northern B.C. residents.

The regulatory application was submitted late last month.

The $5.5 billion project involves the construction of two pipelines and the construction and operation of the Kitimat Marine Terminal.

The two pipelines are each about 1,170 kilometres in length, from Bruderheim, Alberta to Kitimat, B.C.

One 914 mm (36 inch) outside diameter line would carry on average 525,000 barrels per day of petroleum products west to Kitimat.

The other line, a 508 mm (20 inch) outside diameter pipeline, would carry on average 193,000 barrels of condensate per day east to Bruderheim. Condensate is used to thin petroleum products for pipeline transport.

The Kitimat Marine Terminal would have two ship berths and storage for three condensate tanks and 11 petroleum tanks.

If built, the pipeline would carry tar sands crude oil from Alberta to Kitimat, and would bring more than 225 oil tankers a year to B.C.’s North Coast.

Those pipelines are expected to be a petroleum route from the oilsands to China and other Asian energy markets.

Read the complete Post.

Published Tue, 06/08/2010 - 07:00
by Post Carbon Institute

In a recent video interview former Shell Oil Company President John Hofmeister let loose the bracing forecast that, if the world economy shows signs of improvement, petroleum “will surpass $100 a barrel either at the end of this year or during the first half of 2011,” with prices “staying in the triple digits until an alternative source of energy begins to replace liquid fuel.”

For careful listeners, an even bigger bombshell came toward the end of the interview: “I think over the next 5 to 10 years we will peak in the production of what’s called conventional or easy oil. . . . We will not in anyway peak relative to the resources left in the earth. But the resources left in the earth will be higher risk and higher cost to produce, which will increase the cost basis on which ultimately gas prices are set.”

So there you have it. Worldwide production of “conventional” oil will peak and drop off frighteningly soon. But, not to worry: “We will not peak relative to the resources left in the earth.”

Huh? Did Hofmeister just endorse the Peak Oil hypothesis, or deny it? And what does he mean by saying that “the resources left in the earth” will not peak? After all, we’re talking about depleting, non-renewable resources here; does Hofmeister intend to imply that there’s more oil in the Earth’s crust today than there was a couple of hundred years ago before we extracted and burned that last trillion barrels? Weird. Read the complete Post.

Bob Cesca
June 2, 2010, 05:00 PM

Author, One Nation Under Fear

I’m sitting here at my desk watching the oil droids hack away at the blowout preventer in preparation for the “cap” portion of the “cut and cap” procedure, which, contrary to what I’m hearing on cable news, is intended to do something other than stopping the flow of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. In fact, this latest solution isn’t a solution for stopping the flow of oil at all. The oil will continue to gush from the well, only now BP will be able to more effectively harvest some of the oil — a more reliable version of what they were doing with the riser insertion tube for the better part of last month.

Good for them. So they can resume drinking their milkshake between now and August when, we hope, the relief well will be completed. At which time, corporate milkshake drinking will carry on via more conventional methods.

And why not? It’s the free market after all. As I watch these robots slice the riser from the blowout preventer and read the news about lakes of oil moving towards the coasts of Florida. I’m wondering who to blame for this. The list is long, but, in part, I blame anyone who bought into the lines: “government is the problem” and “the era of big government is over.” It’s been systematic deregulation and the elevation of free market libertarian laissez-faire capitalism that have wrought this damage and allowed potentially destructive corporations to write their own rules and do as they please.

Does anyone seriously believe that BP has suddenly become a philanthropic venture interested in doing whatever it takes — sparing no expense — to make the Gulf region whole again? It will do the absolute minimum necessary to weasel its way through this crisis. Not a red cent more. Read the complete Post.

The National
Tamsin Carlisle
* Last Updated: April 20. 2010 6:08PM UAE / April 20. 2010 2:08PM GMT

The Gas Exporting Countries Forum (GECF), made up of nations controlling 70 per cent of the world’s gas reserves, has dropped an Algerian proposal to cut gas exports, thereby proving it is no “Gas OPEC”.

Instead, ministers from its 11-member states resolved yesterday to push for gas prices to be linked to market prices for crude. Read the complete Post.

By James Howard Kunstler on May 2, 2010 10:46 AM

Senator Levin pretty much had Goldman Sach’s Lloyd Blankfein dead in a casket with that now-notorious email from GS’s head of sales and trading, Tom Montag, describing one of their billion-dollar investment “products” as “one shitty deal.” Levin seemed to delight in crossing the boundary into the realm of the unspeakable, knowing that even the so-called “family” newspapers and cable TV networks would have to report it. And just to make sure nobody missed the point, the senator repeated that phrase at least twenty times before the day was over. It was like the climactic scene in that old Hammer Films classic, The Horror of Dracula, where Professor Van Helsing moves from coffin to coffin pounding stakes through the hearts of Drac and all his fellow bloodsuckers

It’s hardly the climax of our story, though. Ours has barely started. It seems to me lately that the crack-up we’ve entered is liable to play out more gruesomely for our privileged elites than the orgy of bloodletting that attended the French Revolution. That historical moment was a sharp transition between old, settled social relations and the new political realities of imminent industrialization and a rising middle class. The elites in charge of things to that moment, an ossified aristocracy, responded to rising discontent with utter feckless stupidity. To make matters worse, a great many of them were hunkered down in the fantasy-land Royal Palace of Versailles, enjoying what was for practical purposes a non-stop mega house party. They must have thought they were safe twelve miles outside Paris. Read the complete Post.

• Shortfall could reach 10m barrels a day, report says
• Cost of crude oil is predicted to top $100 a barrel

Sunday 11 April 2010

by Terry Macalister

The US military has warned that surplus oil production capacity could disappear within two years and there could be serious shortages by 2015 with a significant economic and political impact.

The energy crisis outlined in a Joint Operating Environment report from the US Joint Forces Command, comes as the price of petrol in Britain reaches record levels and the cost of crude is predicted to soon top $100 a barrel.

“By 2012, surplus oil production capacity could entirely disappear, and as early as 2015, the shortfall in output could reach nearly 10 million barrels per day,” says the report, which has a foreword by a senior commander, General James N Mattis.

It adds: “While it is difficult to predict precisely what economic, political, and strategic effects such a shortfall might produce, it surely would reduce the prospects for growth in both the developing and developed worlds. Such an economic slowdown would exacerbate other unresolved tensions, push fragile and failing states further down the path toward collapse, and perhaps have serious economic impact on both China and India.” Read the complete Post.

By Chris Nelder | Friday, April 2nd, 2010

When I began writing about peak oil professionally in 2006, it was generally considered a tinfoil hat theory. The notion that oil production might peak around 2012 (plus or minus) was only taken seriously by a few analysts who were considered extremely pessimistic.

Official forecasts had no cognizance of it whatsoever. All were confident that oil supply would continue to grow steadily to 130 million barrels per day (mbpd) and beyond, at prices that would be considered astoundingly cheap by today’s standards. Oil companies rarely mentioned peak oil, and when they did, it was in a casually dismissive way.

But as time marched on, the cornucopian arguments fell one by one. My longtime readers have seen the story unfold, but for the benefit of new readers, here’s a quick summary…
Forecasts grew increasingly pessimistic as it became apparent that regular conventional crude supply had peaked at the end of 2004. Even as the biggest oil price spike in history ensued from 2005-2008, crude production remained flat and unresponsive.

OPEC scaled back some of its development plans as costs soared. Non-OPEC production not only failed to deliver any actual increase, but began to decline. Forecasts were revised lower.

Corn ethanol boomed and busted, as it was revealed to be the net energy non-starter that serious analysts always knew it was. It also was suspected of adding pressure to food prices at a most inopportune time.

Unconventional production from oil shale and tar sands failed to grow as expected, as producers shied away from high-cost, low-production projects.

The International Energy Agency (IEA) finally included the depletion of mature fields in its analysis, and became increasingly shrill in its warnings about future supply.

A few current and former oil industry executives began making public statements about the diminishing prospects for new supply, and a few even acknowledged that it would be hard to increase production much beyond current levels.

Then high oil prices proved intolerable to an economy stretched thin by the bursting of the bubbles in the real estate and financial sectors.

Yet official recognition of the peak oil threat remained muted, couched in warnings about “adequate investment” and blithe assertions that demand would soon peak, averting any supply shortage.

All that seems to have changed in the last month. A sudden deluge of reports and summit meetings suggest that the oil industry and energy officials are now taking peak oil very seriously indeed.
UK Task Force on Peak Oil: Shortages by 2015 Read the complete Post.