Forever Planting (for Peak Oil & Climate Change)

We depend utterly on fossil fuels, especially to grow our food. From natural gas comes the millions of tons of fertilizers. Oil provides herbicides and pesticides. All is planted and harvested with oil power, driven, shipped or flown to your table. For now. Until fossil fuels become too expensive, too rare, too polluting to use. We only have a short time to find other ways. Wes Jackson offers some answers, for our food supply during peak oil and climate change. Raised on a Kansas farm, Jackson is a biologist, a geneticist, and botanist. In 1976 he left university life to found "The Land Institute", which he still heads. He's going to explain "natural systems agriculture", in a powerful speech given to the Association for the Study of Peak Oil USA. Recorded in Washington D.C. November 4th, 2011 by Gerri Williams for Radio ...

Once, men abused slaves. Now we abuse fossil fuels

In 2005, while teaching history at a French university, I was struck by the general disbelief among students that rational and sensitive human beings could ever hold others in bondage. Slavery was so obviously evil that slave-holders could only have been barbarians. My students could not entertain the idea that some slave-owners could have been genuinely blind to the harm they were doing. At the same time, I was reading a book on climate change which noted how today's machinery – almost exclusively powered by fossil fuels like coal and oil – does the same work that used to be done by slaves and servants. "Energy slaves" now do our laundry, cook our food, transport us, entertain us, and do most of the hard work needed for our survival. Intriguing similarities between slavery and our current dependence on fossil-fuel-powered machines struck me: ...

U.S. gasoline heads for “epic summer”

Refinery outages in the U.S. and Europe and lower U.S. crude prices will support U.S. gasoline refining margins and enable traders to profit from rising U.S. gasoline futures, said Seth Kleinman, global head of energy strategy at Citi. "U.S. gasoline looks fantastic - it is heading for an epic summer," said Kleinman, speaking at the ETF Securities Investment Conference in London on Thursday. "Structurally it will be very supportive for the entire oil market." He said going long gasoline futures and short U.S. crude looked like one of the best trades right now. Kleinman said Citi has liked summer gasoline since November 2011 due to the closure of three refiners on the U.S. East Coast. "The loss of Petroplus capacity, along with the shut down of Hovensa, only makes the bullish case for summer RBOB more compelling," he said. Petroplus, Europe's largest indepdendent refinery by ...

Iran warns of retaliation over oil sanctions

Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said on Friday Iran would retaliate over Western-backed oil sanctions and any threat of attack, after U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta was cited as saying he feared a possible Israeli strike as early as April. Khamenei's defiant speech to mark the anniversary of the 1979 Islamic Revolution was the first direct response to tighter sanctions imposed by the West in recent weeks to force Tehran to abandon a nuclear program it says has purely peaceful ends. "Threatening Iran and attacking Iran will harm America ... Sanctions will not have any impact on our determination to continue our nuclear course ... In response to threats of oil embargo and war, we have our own threats to impose at the right time," Khamenei told worshippers in a speech broadcast live on state television. "I have no fear of saying ...

Indian works on track for world’s first fusion reactor

India, one of the seven participating countries, is keeping pace with the development work assigned to it as part of the joint project to produce energy from fusion, using deuterium and tritium, the two hydrogen isotopes, as fuel at the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER), said project director of India-ITER Shishir Deshpande. The reactor is expected to be ready by 2022 while 500MW power generation could take another decade. India was the last to join the experiment, the first of its kind effort, on the initiative of Anil Kakodkar, former Atomic Energy Commission chairman. Deshpande, from the Institute of Plasma Research, Gandhinagar, Gujarat, is ensuring that Indian scientists and industry deliver their work on time. The entire project is expected to cost about 13 billion Euro. Speaking to TOI on the ambitious project, Deshpande said designing work on 'cryostat', the world's largest ...

The solution to peak oil

Peak oil is not a theory, it is a fact. Although we cannot be ...

Shell Reveals New Growth Agenda for 2012

Royal Dutch Shell provided an update Thursday on progress against its strategic plan to ...

Economics alone should drive countries away from crude oil

In the latest issue of Nature, two scientists take peak oil head-on, analyzing crude ...

Peak oil – it’s history, right?

Peak oil – it’s history, right? Everything has changed so fast. Two years ago, the world ...