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a community peak oil portal
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| Iran agrees to export natural gas to UAE |
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 Iran signed a 2 billion U.S. dollars gas deal with Crescent Petroleum of the United Arab Emirates (UAE), the English-language Press TV reported on Saturday. The UAE is the fourth largest oil producer in the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) but it is in need of clean energy imports to fuel its rapid industrial growth.
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| How badly could a recession hurt cleantech? |
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 It’s safe to say that the cleantech investors who pumped tens of billions of dollars into cleantech over the past three years didn’t expect a serious recession any more than anyone else. Yet with one on the horizon, it looks as if heavily funded technologies like wind and solar power could get hit from more than one direction.
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| Divisions could ‘tear Opec apart’ |
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 Divisions within Opec are being aired ahead of an emergency meeting the organisation has called for next month, signalling tense discussions to come as oil exporting nations struggle to balance their individual revenue needs with the world economy’s need for more stable oil prices.
The divisions could “tear the organisation apart,” a London oil analyst said.
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| End of the world as we know it |
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 We are at a tipping point in history. This is the time when Malthusian facts can no longer be ignored. We passed the peak of energy consumed per capita in the mid-1980s. What hope is there of a sustainable future when we are adding more than 80 million new mouths each year to a world total of 6,7 billion and more than 50 million new cars to an existing fleet of more than 600 million?
Compare this to the world's population at the height of the Roman Empire (200 million) or at the beginning of the Renaissance (400 million).
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| 2-degree rise in temperature may doom penguins |
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 More than half Antarctica's penguin colonies are at risk by a 2-degree global rise in temperatures, according to a report released by the environmental group WWF.
2°C is Too Much cites research showing that 50 percent of the emperor penguins and 75 percent of the Adelie penguins are at risk by a 2-degree increase in temperatures. The report says loss of sea ice will impede penguin nesting and diminish krill populations, an important source of food in the Antarctic food chain.
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| Indonesia - Illegal logging alarming: Landowners take companies to court |
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| The paradise forests of Indonesia, Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands are falling at an alarming rate. Every year 20 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions come from the logging of natural and ancient forests.
Illegal and destructive logging in PNG is fuelling global warming which is melting icecaps, contributing to the drowning of Pacific Islands Countries and low-lying areas in PNG.
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| Charles questions 'green' buildings |
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| The Prince of Wales has criticised the "green building industry" for relying on eco-gadgets like wind turbines and solar panels to justify inefficient buildings.
The Prince called on developers to use traditional methods and materials alongside the best in "eco-technology" to solve the problem of creating environmentally friendly properties instead of opting for "slick, highly marketed techno-fixes".
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| ... So why are trees public enemy No1? |
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| A paltry 2 per cent of Britain is now covered in fragmented ancient woodland (once, admittedly some 6,000 years ago, it was 75 per cent) and according to the Woodland Trust and Ancient Tree Forum, hundreds of woods are under threat from development.
Head into town and things get worse.
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| OPEC wants tighter controls over speculative oil trades |
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| The OPEC cartel called Saturday for tougher regulations to reduce the impact of speculative investment in the oil market which it blames for the huge volatility in crude prices.
Oil peaked at a record high above 147 dollars in July but has since plunged back below 80 dollars a barrel as the financial crisis rocking markets slows economic growth and so demand for energy.
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| Soybeans, coconuts to power jets |
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| Scientists in the US have turned oil from plants like soybeans and
coconuts into jet fuel that is equivalent to kerosene derived
from oil.
According to a report in the Scientific American, working with the U.S. Department of Defense's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), scientists at the Energy and Environmental Research Center (EERC) at the University of North Dakota turned these plant oils into fuel that had a similar density, energy content and even freezing point.
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| Shell’s hilarious attempt to beef up email security |
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| ...The series of leaked Shell internal emails to our website revealing construction flaws in the Sakhalin-2 project cost Shell many billions of dollars after the Russian government used the evidence as a pretext to take back ownership. The move cost Shell £11 billion UK pounds according to an article by The Sunday Times, which Shell managed to kill just before publication.
We have received countless leaked Shell internal emails over the years. On 21 December 2007, Reuters published a news story with the headline: “Shell to cut thousands of IT jobs”. It went on to say that an internal Shell email had been supplied to the “Shell protest website RoyalDutchShellPlc.com”. Most UK and International newspapers, including the Financial Times and The Wall Street Journal picked up the Shell IT outsourcing story.
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| Oil to Reach New Highs by Year-End |
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| Despite severe economic turmoil, demand for oil is rising significantly—in fact, it will land somewhere in the range of $150 to $157, according to Roger Wiegand, editor of Trader Tracks.
A native of Michigan, Roger has had an interest in precious metals and futures since the commodity rallies of the late 1970s and early 1980s. His background in a 25-year real estate development and construction career specialized in forward planning, consulting, and using creative skills for conceptual project thinking. His present work is focused on the precious metals, currency, energy and interest rate markets for trading on the primary American exchanges. Experience in land, development and base material projects has evolved into consulting for mining companies and analyzing those markets. He has developed longer-term ideas for finance and mining marketing doing work on behalf of private and public mining companies. Roger’s consulting work is to focus on concepts and “big picture” forward planning for mining companies. His newsletters utilize the global news, and his personal research and knowledge for expressing personal trading ideas.
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| The Perils of the Coming Sugar Economy |
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| Peak oil, skyrocketing fuel costs, and the climate crisis are driving corporate enthusiasm for a "biological engineering revolution" that some predict will dramatically transform industrial production of food, energy, materials, medicine, and the ecosystem. Advocates of converging technologies promise a greener, cleaner post-petroleum future, where the production of economically important compounds depends not on fossil fuels but on biological manufacturing platforms fueled by plant sugars. It may sound sweet and clean. But the "sugar economy" will be the catalyst for a corporate grab on all plant matter as well as the destruction of biodiversity on a massive scale.
The future bioeconomy will rely on "extreme genetic engineering," a suite of technologies currently in early stages of development. It includes cheap and fast gene sequencing, made-to-order biological parts, genome engineering and design, and nano-scale materials fabrication and operating systems. The common denominator is that all these technologies — biotech, nanotech, synthetic biology — involve engineering of living organisms at the nano-scale. This technological convergence is also driving a convergence of corporate power. New bioengineering technologies attract billions of dollars in corporate funding from energy, chemical, and agribusiness giants, including DuPont, BP, Shell, Chevron, and Cargill.
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| Warning signs of an Israeli strike on Iran |
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| Some key decision makers in Israel fear that unless they attack Iranian nuclear enrichment facilities in the next few months, while George W Bush is still president, there will not be another period when they can rely on the United States as being anywhere near as supportive in the aftermath of a unilateral attack.
In the past 40 years there have been few occasions when I have been more concerned about a specific conflict escalating to involve, economically, the whole world. We are watching a disinformation exercise involving a number of intelligence services. Reality is becoming ever harder to disentangle.
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| Looking back to a grim US future |
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| THE AMERICAN FUTURE: A HISTORY (BBC2)
"IF we succumb to a dream world, we will wake up to a nightmare." It's a brilliant oratorical line, worthy of a president, but who uttered it? Barack Obama? John McCain? Sarah Palin? Er, no. Definitely not.
It was Jimmy Carter, the most decent president Americans never knew they had and a central figure in the first part of The American Future: A History, four compelling, documentaries authored by historian Simon Schama that delve into the country's past for pointers to its future.
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