News from May 2010

IEA sees 2010 boost in energy spend

Money spent on exploration and development projects would however still be about 10% below its investment peak seen in 2008, Reuters cited Trevor Morgan as saying at an industry event. “We don’t actually see much of an increase in capacity on a net basis in the next 5 years,” said Morgan. “Hence our concern is [...]

UK Royal Society to re-examine climate change

Britain’s premier scientific institution is being forced to review its statements on climate change after a rebellion by members who question mankind’s contribution to rising temperatures. The Royal Society has appointed a panel to rewrite the 350-year-old institution’s official position on global warming. It will publish a new “guide to the science of climate change” [...]

Humility in a Climate Age

Since the dawn of modernity, the balance between naturalism and mastery has been increasingly weighted toward mastery. Our attempt to decipher nature’s ways and manipulate them in the service of human betterment has been accelerating for centuries and shows few signs of abatement. Indeed, we seem continually committed to run roughshod over the nonhuman world. [...]

How We Can End Our Addiction to Oil

Richard Heinberg of Post Carbon Institute said it best: “This is what the end of the oil age looks like. The cheap, easy petroleum is gone; from now on, we will pay steadily more and more for what we put in our gas tanks—more not just in dollars, but in lives and health, in a [...]

UK Energy minister to Hold Peak Oil Summit

“Government has gone from the BP position – ’40 years of supply left, the price mechanism works, no need to worry’ – to ‘crikey’,” he said. “BP and others are telling us that, but you lot, Virgin, Scottish and Southern, and others are telling us something completely different. We do not know who to believe. [...]

EU Launches TWENTIES Project: Largest Industrial Energy Project Ever

The project is to advance the development and implementation of new technologies that will make it possible to increase the use of wind power in Europe significantly. This will contribute to the EU objective for 2020: a 20% reduction in CO2 emissions; a 20% improvement in energy efficiency, and a 20% share of consumption from [...]

Coal Hard Facts

More than six thousand workers are killed every year in China’s coal mines. The World Health Organization estimates that in East Asia, a region made up predominantly of China and South Korea, 355,000 people a year die from the effects of urban outdoor air pollution. All over China, limestone buildings are dissolving in the acidic [...]

Matt Simmons Tells Bloomberg Only Way To Contain Oil Leak Is With Small Nuclear Bomb

n his May 28th interview with Bloomberg’s Mark Crumpton and Lori Rothman, Matt Simmons of energy investment bank Simmons & Company, provides some stunning revelations on what is really occurring in the Gulf of Mexico, and proposes that the only effective way to contain the leak is to relieve BP, bring in the military, and [...]

The Sun’s Recent Behavior Is Odd, Scientists Baffled

Sunspots, markers of magnetic activity on the sun’s surface, provide a visual proxy to mark the cycle’s evolution, appearing in droves at maximum and all but disappearing at minimum. But the behavior of our host star is not as predictable as all that—the most recent solar minimum was surprisingly deep and long, finally bottoming out [...]

A Growing Network Preparing for the World’s End

“A ‘shit hit the fan’ scenario happens to just about everyone sometime in their life,” he says. “Preparing and having a ‘prepper’ mindset will lessen the impact of whatever disaster it may be that you might experience in your life.” Fair enough. But is it really necessary to spend hundreds of dollars on packaged emergency [...]