Shell Oil and The Calgary Herald lead Oilsands Greenwashing campaign
From PR Watch

The UK Advertising Standards Authority ruled that a Shell ad describing Canada’s oilsands as “sustainable” was “misleading.” The advertising regulator noted the “considerable social and environmental impacts” of oilsands development, adding that Shell has not explained how it will manage “carbon emissions from its oilsands projects in order to limit climate change.”

The World Wildlife Fund filed a complaint accusing Shell of “greenwashing,” after the ad appeared in the Financial Times. Shell agreed not to run the ad again.

The UK Ad watchdog pointed out that oilsands development “uses enormous amounts of fresh water and natural gas and produces about three times as much greenhouse gas emissions as conventional oil output.” Read the complete Post.

Traditional Energy’s Modern Boom
High Prices Are Driving Increased Extraction of Oil and Other Fossil Fuels
By Joel Achenbach
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, August 15, 2008; A01
Original article

AMWELL, Pa. — The guys on the derrick, filthy with mud and grease, have the best view in the county. Their drilling rig rises from a bulldozed, flattened patch of meadow near the top of a hill. To the south is an old farmhouse and a white barn. Hay bales dry in the sun.

It’s classically pastoral as far as the eye can see, which makes all the more dramatic the presence of this derrick, 160 feet high, and the construction trailers, and the mud gushing into a holding pond, and all the roaring machinery.

Heavy industry has invaded the countryside because of something called the Marcellus Shale. It’s a layer of hard, black rock, more than a mile down. Trapped in tiny pores of that rock is a huge quantity of natural gas. The Marcellus Shale could become what people in the natural gas business call a big play.

“It’s a gold rush, really. It’s a boom,” said Steve Rupert, an executive with Range Resources, which is drilling aggressively in the rolling farmland southwest of Pittsburgh.

This is the world of 21st-century energy, which around here looks surprisingly like 19th-century energy. There is little evidence that the old, conventional sources of energy are about to disappear, or that the free market by itself is going to drive a transition to clean, renewable power. Read the complete Post.

August 14, 2008
By JAD MOUAWAD
Original article in NY Times

VPO note - The Bush administration, still exploring just how far they’re willing to go to secure energy supplies, has sent troops into Georgia.

Meanwhile, Russia is using the cover of war to try to knock out oil pipelines to the West.

When the main pipeline that carries oil through Georgia was completed in 2005, it was hailed as a major success in the United States policy to diversify its energy supply. Not only did the pipeline transport oil produced in Central Asia, helping move the West away from its dependence on the Middle East, but it also accomplished another American goal: it bypassed Russia.

American policy makers hoped that diverting oil around Russia would keep the country from reasserting control over Central Asia and its enormous oil and gas wealth and would provide a safer alternative to Moscow’s control over export routes that it had inherited from Soviet days. The tug-of-war with Moscow was the latest version of the Great Game, the 19th-century contest for dominance in the region.

A bumper sticker that American diplomats distributed around Central Asia in the 1990s as the United States was working hard to make friends there summed up Washington’s strategic thinking: “Happiness is multiple pipelines.” Read the complete Post.

The Era of Catastrophe? Geologists Name New Era After Human Influence on the Planet
By Mike Davis, Tomdispatch.com. Posted August 11, 2008.

A striking report from the front lines of science suggests we’re officially entering a period in which humanity may simply outrun history itself.

Editor’s note: This TomDispatch article has been edited for length. You can read the original here.

1. Farewell to the Holocene

Our world, our old world that we have inhabited for the last 12,000 years, has ended, even if no newspaper in North America or Europe has yet printed its scientific obituary.

This February, while cranes were hoisting cladding to the 141st floor of the Burj Dubai tower (which will soon be twice the height of the Empire State Building), the Stratigraphy Commission of the Geological Society of London was adding the newest and highest story to the geological column. Although the idea of the “Anthropocene” — an Earth epoch defined by the emergence of urban-industrial society as a geological force — has been long debated, stratigraphers have refused to acknowledge compelling evidence for its advent.

At least for the London Society, that position has now been revised. This new age, they explain, is defined both by the heating trend … and by the radical instability expected of future environments. In somber prose, they warn that “the combination of extinctions, global species migrations and the widespread replacement of natural vegetation with agricultural monocultures is producing a distinctive contemporary biostratigraphic signal. These effects are permanent, as future evolution will take place from surviving (and frequently anthropogenically relocated) stocks.” Evolution itself, in other words, has been forced into a new trajectory. Read the complete Post.

Shoulder Season
From the Clusterfuck Nation blog

America is on vacation from its financial, fiscal, and economic problems, having left the centers of power in Wall Street and Washington for a Nantucket-of-the-mind, where, in a haze of artisanal vodka and bong smoke, it’s out in the cool dune grass watching imaginary whalefishes blow, leaving only the TV Bubbleheads behind back home. Larry Kudlow of CNBC was practically drooling into his cufflinks on screen last week when the dollar popped against the Euro, and crude oil slumped, and the equity markets climbed up a flagpole.

This sort of euphoria is actually an alarming pre-crash symptom, in this case of a patient (the US) entering the terminal phase of sclerosis. Our society and all its playerz — especially the appointed communicators — just can’t fathom the reality of the threats we face, which are 1.) the loss of primary energy resources, 2.) the loss of technological potency, and 3.) the loss of a comfortable standard of living. Read the complete Post.

‘Think Less………Act Locally’
The Rise of Localization
By Russell Precious

VPO note: the author refers to “localization” vs. “relocalization” because he doesn’t believe we’re returning to something that existed in the past, but rather moving towards something entirely new.

“The most personal reaction to landscape, to people, to ways of living, is that which is rooted in the local.” Wallace Stegner

In recent years it has been increasingly presumed that civilization was firmly entrenched on the path to some sort of nirvanic global village, a vision held equally by those representing both the ‘left’ and the ‘right’—albeit based on different principles and expected outcomes. The right viewed it more as an economic paradise of ever expanding markets and greater prosperity while the left saw it as a truly democratic world wide web of shared information and a diminishing gap between wealth and poverty.

Few have been willing to address the herd of elephants in the room that are poised to derail these presupposed outcomes. What are these elephants, and how did they (and we) get here? Read the complete Post.

by Rex Weyler
From his “Deep Green” column
Original article

As the era of cheap liquid fuels draws to an end, everything about modern consumer society will change. Likewise, developing societies pursuing the benefits of globalization will struggle to grow economies in an era of scarce liquid fuels. The most localized, self-reliant communities will experience the least disruption.

Oil is a fixed asset of the planet, representing stored sunlight accumulated over a billion years as early marine algae, and other marine organisms (not dinosaurs) captured solar energy, formed carbon bonds, gathered nutrients, died, sank to the ocean floors, and lay buried under eons of sediment. Like any fixed non-renewable resource, oil is limited, and its consumption will rise, peak, and decline.

World oil production increased for 150 years until the spring of 2005, when world crude oil production reached about 74.3 million barrels per day (mb/d), and total liquid fuels, including tar sands, liquefied gas, and biofuels reached about 85 mb/d. In spite of the efforts since, and tales of “trillions of barrels” of oil in undiscovered fields, liquid fuel production has remained at about 85.5 mb/d for three years, the longest sustained plateau in modern petroleum history. Discoveries of new fields peaked 40 years ago. Read the complete Post.

The Dutch are usually known for a balanced and well thought out opinion and the latest public release by CIEP merits that opinion. The summary posting on The Oil Drum (TOD) is at:

http://europe.theoildrum.com/node/4358#more

And, this is where I saw good news amongst the numbers that echo what most “Peakers” have known for some time. If we can hold to a plateau in production over the next 5 to 10 years, we might have a good chance for a soft landing; and, prices based on local value is a major improvement over the preceding consume-at-all-costs commodity market for oil. That is, the price of oil will more directly reflect its true value and worth, and that is a good thing.

The best outcome we hoped for was to significantly, or stop, blowing the precious endowment out our tailpipe and use the resource for much higher value items such as medical supplies, key materials and even clothing products. (Full disclosure, I love the new materials used in golf shirts, and polypropylene ski clothing). Somewhere between the lines of this monumental report I saw this awareness peaking out. (oops, watch the puns!).

This is not to say that the immediate changes, phases, and convulsions won’t be painless. We are in for some challenging times none the less. However, perhaps the CIEP report will catch the attention at the appropriate levels as the Hirsch Report, the GAO report, the Pentagon Report, the multitude of YouTube videos should have, the constant warnings and recriminations of Simons, Kuntsler, Heinberg and Campbell should have; and most importantly, will catch the attention of everyday middle management and family dinner table discussions.

We may now have the paradigm set in place as described by Fatih Birol to, “leave oil before it leaves us.” That is the good news ensconced in verbiage and sometimes overwhelming content of a report of this scope. As an engineer working in the energy business, I see a faint glimmer of hope that a greatly reduced energy society is more likely than the Olduvai Gorge - or massive die off.

We still have a long way to go campers, but its a start.  Matter of fact, to earn a merit badge one must read the referenced link!  There will be a test…

Our very own Jon Cooksey has done an incredible job putting together a peak-oil road map not unlike the ‘Candyland’ board game. He is currently shooting the much anticipated documentary How to boil a Frog. The documentary is an eco-comedy that mixes rapid-fire humor and hard-hitting facts to show the consequences of “overshoot” — too many people using up too little planet — and what it means for our future. With an upfront ‘Everyman’ approach, smart writing, world-class experts, and iconoclastic humor, How to Boil a Frog gives us the scoop on the imminent end of the world as we know it and 5 surprising ways you can save civilization – while laughing along the way. Because if were not having fun….then whats the point!

Check out some of these great shorts:

What is peak oil?

Peak oil - The bigger picture

What does energy returned on energy invested mean?

The Great Change

Albert Bates, author of The Post Petroleum Survival Guide and Cookbook, brings you along on his personal journey.

A Wave With Words

Yesterday I met a man who had a wave with words. He was a cognitive semanticist. His name is Joe Brewer. He contributes to an ongoing discussion of climate policy from the viewpoint of cognitive science at rockridgenation.org.

Those who regularly surf NPR or PBS will probably have seen Joe Brewer’s mentor at Berkeley, George Latoff, most often in political campaign season. Latoff is that guy who talks about language, and how conservative spinmeisters have co-opted the discussion by framing the question. Some classic examples are the “death tax,” (for inheritance taxes), “War on Terror” (for illegal, immoral and endless military adventurism), or “intelligent design” (for creationism).

Read the rest of the article here

Short synopsis on language and framing

1) Switch the language back to actually describing what is going on. “Healthy Forests Initiative” should be called “No Tree Left Behind.”

2) “Liberal” means “a command of the basic facts and a sense of being an equal, not a superior.”

3)  environmentalists, and environmentalism, have been negatively framed. Those treehuggers would have us sacrifice comfort and well-being for the sake of some abstract aesthetic value — polar bears on an ice floe, or a tiny snail darter in a dammed stream.

 The NeoCon frame goes like this:

• Nature is a resource waiting to be exploited.
• Wealth is measured by money.
• Industry makes money, and thus creates wealth.
• Markets, which aid wealth creation, are naturally good.
• Any intrusion by government upon free markets is bad.
• Polluting is the natural consequence of industry, so pollution is an inevitable side-effect of wealth.
• Protection of the economy and protection of the environment are goals that inevitably conflict.
• If industry is forced to achieve environmental goals, then companies should be compensated for the cost.
• The better choice is for governments just to leave it to the markets.

Instead of that, we can reframe:

• Nature is the basis of our survival.
• Wealth is really about well-being; having good friends, or living in a flourishing community.
• A healthy economy requires a healthy environment.
• We all breathe the air. It is our right to have it, and in clean, healthy condition.
• Markets are tools for achieving societal goals and should serve those purposes.
• Markets should generate wealth in the broad sense — the health of the planet and future generations.
• Good government makes markets possible.
• Unregulated markets destroy the societal goals that created them.
• Regulation of industry and markets creates real wealth, and enduring wealth, in the broadest sense.