Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
In a global economy where we drive cars built in Japan, work on computers made in China and eat shrimp caught and peeled in Thailand, why do we hesitate to use oil pumped in Saudi Arabia? Do we fear oil shortages or embargoes? We’ve weathered those before. The oil exporting countries can only hold back so long- they have to sell the stuff. Camels won’t drink it, and you can’t make vodka from it.
Western Europe and Scandinavia have been held up as leaders in moving to a low-carbon future in electricity generation, but the reality is very mixed. Scandinavia benefits from its large hydroelectric resources, relative to population size, and therefore has a very low electricity carbon footprint. France is low carbon due to its predominantly nuclear-based generating capacity.
Yesterday’s installment of the What Now: Momentum Slowed series addressed the likely first blasts of the Trumpeters to weaken the current federal framework of clean energy and environmental rules, policies and programs. Today I am continuing that discussion starting in the agency regulatory arena and moving on to the courts.
I try, often as not, to refrain from raising problems without suggesting something by way of useful answers. There are those times, of course, when anything approximating an upbeat response is simply beyond the ken or need wait for events to catch up. Regarding the incoming Trump administration, any definitive answer to WHAT NOW for clean energy and climate sustainability will require patience.
I don’t doubt the nation’s transition to a clean energy economy will continue after The D is inaugurated in January. Economics, a rapidly growing number of companies owning responsibility for their carbon emissions and ordinary people acting on behalf of future generations underpin the trend towards environmental sustainability.
The US Energy Information Administration, or EIA, regularly updates its estimates for how much oil and gas might be recovered in the future, and at what rate. With the application of new technology from year to year, those estimates generally keep going up. But it’s important to remember that they are just estimates — and the devil is always in the details.
As captains of the fossil fuel industries and their lobbyists prepare to take over the White House – appointed by a President elected by a minority, claiming to represent the people on an anti-elite ticket yet possessing by far the highest cumulative wealth of any cabinet ever – they will face evidence breaking out all around them of a fast-moving global energy transition threatening to strand the fossil fuels they seek to boost.
Authors Richard Heinberg and David Fridley in their recent book Our Renewable Future make the case for a society that runs on 100 percent renewable energy. But they don’t pull any punches, giving us both the good news and the bad news.
Photo-Voltaics (PV) is an energy source where this problem has been more acute. Equipment and installation prices collapsed four or five fold since 2010, but published EROEI studies have not converged; in fact it appears they dispersed even further.
Oil has fueled a bully bromance between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin.
The notion of “decoupling” energy consumption from economic growth has become vogue in policy circles, but how much evidence is there that it’s really happening?
Americans are literally and figuratively in the driver’s seat of world oil consumption.
