Click on the headline (link) for the full text.
Many more articles are available through the Energy Bulletin homepage.
“How to Boil a Frog” – new online interviews; showing in Santa Monica Oct 8-10
Jon Cooksey, email
Jon’s website has several new interviews about the movie at http://howtoboilafrog.com/themovie/
See especially the Electronic Press Kits (EPK). Some great ideas about communicating peak oil, etc. to a large audience.
-BA
I’ve just been writing my friends in LA about this, but thought I’d write you in case EB readers in LA would be interested. “How to Boil a Frog” will be showing at the Blue Planet Film Festival in Santa Monica in a couple of weeks, 4 showings altogether. I’ll be there for all 4. The website schedule is a little hard to navigate, so I’ve excerpted the Frog showings and put in clickable links to where people can buy tickets online – $7 – cheap! There are, of course, lots of other eco-films there too – but Frog may be the only comedy!
Friday Oct 8th
12:15 p.m. – HTBAF showing at the Santa Monica Playhouse, 1211 4th St., back theater of the Playhouse (Venue 4) – FUTURE 16
Saturday Oct 9th
11:25 p.m. – HTBAF showing at Santa Monica Bay Women’s Club, 1210 4th St., club (Venue 2) – LAND 25
Sun Oct 10th (2 showings)
1) Noon – HTBAF showing at Santa Monica Playhouse, 1211 4th St., front theater of the Playhouse (Venue 3) – LAND 51
2) 12:15 p.m. – HTBAF showing at Santa Monica Bay Women’s Club, 1210 4th St., club (Venue 2) – FUTURE 46
(Note: the ticketing process currently shows the wrong times for 2 showings – they’re fixing this – the above times are correct.)
Love to meet EB folk in person if they can attend! Hope I can squeak into a Bay Area film fest so we can get together again soon!
“Hope begins in the dark, the stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right thing, the dawn will come. You wait and watch and work: you don’t give up.” – Anne Lamott
(3 October 2010)
"How to Boil a Frog" is a funny film about unfunny things like peak oil, climate change, etc. Website: http://www.howtoboilafrog.com/
Jon is an ally of Energy Bulletin and a contributor.
-BA
Peak Shrink blogs on peak oil tonight for Honda
Kathy McMahon, Peak Oil Blues
Email message:
Apologies for the impersonal group mailing but I wanted to let you know some exciting personal news. I’ve been asked to write a post for Honda Motors about Peak Oil that I’ll be posting tonight after 11 pm, and it will be widely publicized. Honda Motors is talking about oil depletion and has asked me to contribute.
Here is the link which will be active tonight after 11 pm: LINK If the link works now, and is password protected before 11pm tonight, the password is "honda."
Also, starting this Wednesday, I begin a talk and conversation throughout the Pacific Northwest.Please pass this along if you know anyone in Oregon, Washington state or British Columbia. Click here for more information.
Best to you,
Kathy McMahon
“This post is a contribution to Honda’s “Racing Against Time” thought leadership series. Peak Oil Blues was selected to provide a unique perspective on how we should approach the discussion of oil as a finite energy source. During the first week of October 2010, five individuals provide their own thoughts on the subject. These independent contributors were not compensated for their participation and as such their views are their own and do not necessarily reflect those of Honda. Details and links to what others are saying about “Racing Against Time” can be found at www.facebook.com/honda.
(3 October 2010)
Kathy McMahon, "Peak Shrink," has been writing on the psychological aspects of peak oil for years on her blog, Peak Oil Blues. She is a regular contributor to Energy Bulletin. -BA
Jason Bradford reports that Kathy’s post is now online:
http://www.peakoilblues.org/blog/?p=2391
Dispatches from The Earth Blog: A Free Downloadable Mini-Book
Keith Farnish, Earth Blog
This is no swan song; no sad farewell. Maybe, though, it’s time to pause a while and think back to what has been said. After more than 4 years writing a mixture of research articles, contrarian polemic, calls to arms and personal expressions of my search for something better, it is no surprise that the power of words sometimes needs reinforcing in its fragile, ephemeral state.
My friend Guy McPherson inspired this partial anthology of essays from The Earth Blog; his review of “greatest hits” on Nature Bats Last is dispassionate, letting the words speak for themselves. However, there is a proviso – the essays shown in this specially produced volume exist for a reason: writing on The Earth Blog is hard, often so hard that essays can take months from idea to publication. Each essay means something important, and the essays presented here I consider to be particularly important in reflecting the way I feel we must approach and tackle the problems inherent in the collapsing mess we were once proud to call Earth.
It is not an exhaustive set by any means; some important pieces, such as my interview with Carolyn Baker, and “100 Ways To Undermine The Industrial Machine” just don’t fit, so the web sites (The Earth Blog, The Unsuitablog and A Matter of Scale) and my book “Time’s Up!” – which some of these essays are extensions of – remain the primary source of information.
The essays are unedited, unabridged, and often very intense. The order in which they are presented is in the form of a branching journey, culminating in the only piece of complete fiction published on The Earth Blog. If there is a stepping-off point where you can most surely take charge of your own destiny, then that is probably it.
Over the course of the years I have been fortunate to come into contact with some very imaginative, brilliant and life-affirming people: I do not want to name individuals for fear of missing someone out; but rest assured, their influence runs through the lines of these essays. Invention may be the domain of the individual, but change is the destiny only of those who are prepared to come together and make it happen.
Keith Farnish
August 2010, Scotland.
To download "Dispatches from The Earth Blog" or read it online, simply click on the following link, or paste it into your browser address bar:
http://www.archive.org/details/DispatchesFromTheEarthBlog
The mini-book is designed to be printed double-sided on A4 with long-sided stapling. It has 28 pages (7×4) so can also be printed in booklet form using appropriate formatting. Note: text is generally 10pt, and sans serif, so reduced will be small, but readable.
(30 August 2010)
Guy McPherson presentiations available online (fossil fuel, bioenergy)
Guy R. McPherson, blog
Two presentations follow. The first focuses on the twin sides of the fossil fuel coin and what we can do about it, as presented in Louisville, Kentucky earlier this week. It’s similar to many presentations I’ve given recently and it includes an audio file, so you can follow along with the slides. The second was presented at International Bioenergy Days 2010 in Rockford, Illinois. As usual, the formats are awkward here, requiring you to download the large files as read-only Powerpoint documents. As usual, an email request will result in me sending you the original Powerpoint file(s).
When I discuss mitigation for ecological and economic collapse, I stress the crucial role of human community. And I’m not the only one: A few students with whom I am working this semester are focusing on how to communicate in community, with full awareness where we are and where we’re headed. They have developed a blog, and I encourage your participation as we struggle to find our way in a world turned inside out.
Louisville, Kentucky public library Tuesday, 28 September 2010
Powerpoint (pdf)
International Bioenergy Days 2010 presentation Monday, 27 September 2010
Powerpoint (pdf)
(1 October 2010)
Online seminars from Imperial College, Longdon: future energy options
Tara LaForce, Imperial College London via FaceBook
Society is at a crossroads both in terms of environmental catastrophe and limits of non-renewable resources. The decisions we make now about energy will have an impact on the quality of life of our descendents, which is likely to be substantially lower if we choose to ignore the twin threats of environmental degradation and resource depletion. Yet despite enormous publicity, in the past few years little has been done about developing a sustainable economy that functions within global resource limits.
There are two divergent directions that the post-oil/gas world may take: The preferred direction is wide-spread decarbonisation of the energy and transport sector, which may or may not be combined with utilisation of remaining oil and coal reserves. This option would be broadly in line with efforts to mitigate CO2 emissions for environmental reasons. The second option is to move into heavy oil, tar sands and converting coal into liquid transport fuel. This option would result in a large increase of CO2 emissions as all three fuel sources require substantial energy to be refined into usable gasoline. This option may be the most likely if repeated oil price shocks were to occur and would have a catastrophic impact on any attempt to limit global CO2 emissions.
Imperial College and Nature Publishing are very excited to bring you a series of 5 online seminars, open to the general public, to share and discuss the latest research on a variety of our impending energy challenges. The key goal of this event is to enable members of the general public to ask their questions directly to scientists and engineers in person, and without the press as an intermediary.
Would you like to learn more about the UK’s plans to transition to lower carbon energy economy by 2050?
In 2008 the UK government commissioned the Committee on Climate Change (CCC) to write the report “Building a low-carbon economy” (http://www.theccc.org.uk/reports/building-a-low-carbon-economy) to establish realistic goals to allow the UK to make an 80% reduction of CO2 emissions from the 1990 level by 2050. The CCC states that decarbonisation of the power sector is key to reducing emissions, and estimates that it will cost 1%-2% of the UK GDP to 2050 to make the 80% emissions cut, but that this requires strong political leadership and policies. The CCC report (2008) calls for a focus on efficiency combined with a transition to alternative and lower-carbon energy sources and classifies wind, nuclear and carbon capture and storage (CCS) ‘viable low-carbon’ energy sources over the next 15 years, with other less well-developed energy sources making contributions in the longer term.
On Tuesday, October 12 from 4:30 pm to 6:00 pm (UK time) at the Elucian Islands in Second Life, one of the CCC committee members, Prof Sir Brian Hoskins, coauthor of the CCC report and Director of the Imperial Grantham Institute for Climate change will be speaking about the report. The podcast of the lecture will also be available afterwards.
Would you like to learn more about alternative energy resources such as fuel cells?
With fossil fuels increasing in price and decreasing in availability, alternative energies are going to have to fulfil more of our energy needs. One such technology is fuel cells, which generates energy using oxygen and hydrogen and has only water as a waste product. However, there is substantial research to be done in this exciting area before fuel cells are efficient and economic for wide-spread use.
On Thursday, October 14 from 4:30 pm to 6:00 pm (UK time) at the Elucian Islands in Second Life, Prof Nigel Brandon, director of the Imperial College Energy Futures Lab will be speaking about his research on new Fuel Cell technologies. The podcast of the lecture will also be available afterwards.
Would you like to learn more about Peak Oil?
In “The global oil depletion report” the UKERC stated that ‘A peak in conventional oil production before 2030 appears likely and there is a significant risk of a peak before 2020.’ (http://www.ukerc.ac.uk/support/Global%20Oil%20Depletion) Even a 2030 peak in oil production leaves society precious little time to develop the large-scale changes necessary for a post-oil transport sector. Failure to plan ahead, or an earlier peak in oil is likely to result in repeated oil and gas price shocks such as the one in July 2008 and may have devastating global economic consequences.
On Monday, October 18 from 4:30pm – 6:00pm (UK time) at the Elucian Islands in Second Life, Dr. Steven Sorrell, lead author of the UKERC report on global oil depletion, will be speaking about their report. The podcast of the lecture will also be available afterwards.
Would you like to learn more about Carbon Capture and Storage?
Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) is one of the technologies least-understood by the public for reduction of CO2 emissions, and yet most government plans for a lower-carbon future depend on widespread deployment of this technology. CCS consists of capturing the emissions of point sources such as power plants, transporting it to a suitable storage location and injecting it in geological formations kilometres below the surface of the earth. Both the capture and storage of CO2 are open areas of research. The main technological capture challenges are to catch and compress the CO2 without incurring a large energy cost that ruins the efficiency of the power plant. The main storage challenges are to select suitable sites and design a process that stores enormous volumes of CO2 safely for millions of years, without it escaping back into the atmosphere.
On Tuesday, October 19 from 4:30 pm to 6:00 pm (UK time) at the Elucian Islands in Second Life, Dr. Paul Fennel, will be speaking about his research at Imperial College on carbon capture from point sources, and on Thursday, October 21 from 4:30 pm to 6:00 pm (UK time) at the Elucian Islands in Second Life, Dr. Tara LaForce, will be speaking about her research at Imperial College on carbon storage. The podcast of the lectures will also be available afterwards.
For more information, check out our new facebook group on the Future of Low Carbon Energy: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=136378543064934 or email Tara LaForce at [email protected]. Our facebook group provides information on our upcoming series of online talks and is also a forum for discussion of our energy options for the next century.
(1 October 2010)
