Biofuels

Why the U.S. is NOT the new Saudi Arabia

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Last week’s energy news included a piece from the Associated Press with a headline reading: "U.S. poised to become world’s top oil producer; may soon overtake Saudi Arabia." If the reporter had actually examined figures available from the U.S. Energy Information Administration website carefully instead of simply parroting oil industry sycophants, he would have ended up with a headline more like this: "Marginal gains in U.S. oil production mean continuing high prices and imports for Americans."

Bioenergy, TLUDs, and our 2012 stove camp

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Both Solar Bob and Doc agree that trying to get charcoal-burning cultures like Haiti to give up making and burning charcoal is a lost cause, not worth spending much time on. We are less convinced of the hopelessness of conversion, having the card up our sleeve of eCOOLnomics still to play. Pop Culture can marry Mother Earth. We can make it cool to sequester carbon in the soil.

Energy – Sept 12

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-Wind could meet many times world’s total power demand by 2030, Stanford researchers say
-EU proposal would limit use of crop-based biofuels
-Indian blackout held no fear for small hamlet where the power stayed on
-Asia Risks Water Scarcity Amid Coal-Fired Power Embrace

Review: Too Much Magic by James Kunstler

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…Kunstler has a new work of social criticism titled Too Much Magic, his first nonfiction book since The Long Emergency came out in 2005. The book is an inquiry into a skewed, delusional perception of reality that Kunstler thinks has become “baseline normal for the American public lately.” Americans, he says, have been led astray by the incredible technological advancements of recent times. We’ve come to believe that any problem we face is solvable—as if by magic—with the application of some new technology.

Renewables and biofuels – Aug 31

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-Debunking wind energy myths – At a glance
-Merkel’s Other Crisis Spurs German Quest For Energy Holy Grail
-Dark clouds gather over China’s once-booming solar industry
-US solar PV market more than doubles to topple Europe
-Biofuel fails EU sustainability test, German researchers claim
-Keiser report: Monopolies, Military, Mayhem
-In Drought, Should Corn Be Food Or Fuel?

Mother: Caring for 7 Billion (documentary film review)

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The documentary takes a penetrating look at overpopulation, what fuels it and why the world has become complacent about the issue after making a good start in addressing it during the late 60s. The film dispels some key myths about overpopulation – chief among them the belief that it’s long been solved – even if it stops short of admitting the inevitability of a world population crash as the Earth’s resources deplete. And it conveys its message in an engaging, visually immersive style that finds just the right balance between hard facts and ordinary human involvement.

Fool me twice, shame on me: The oil industry repackages the fake abundance story (from the late 1990s)

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Only the oil industry would now have the audacity once again to peddle a story that it has gotten wrong for more than a decade as if it were brand new. Enlisting the media and its army of paid consultants, the industry is once again telling the public that oil abundance is at hand. And, what is doubly audacious is that it is promoting this tale as oil prices hover at levels more than eight times the 1999 low.

The Cussedness of Whole Systems

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There’s an interesting divergence between the extreme complexity of the predicament that besets contemporary industrial civilization, on the one hand, and the remarkable simplicity of the failures of reasoning that have sent us hurtling face first into that predicament, on the other. Nearly all of those failures share a common root, which is the inability—or at least the unwillingness—of most people in the modern world to pay attention to the natural cussedness of whole systems.