Energy Crunch: Energy round-up: why the government should stick to its carbon budget
Weakening the UK’s Fourth Carbon Budget has no legal basis and would be economically damaging.
Energy Policy
Fracking headlines
•Fracking by the Numbers: Key Impacts of Dirty Drilling at the State and National Level •Monterey Shale isn’t all it’s fracked up to be •West Virginia Landfills Will Now Accept Unlimited Amounts Of Often Radioactive Fracking Waste •Too Big to Believe: Top Economists Doubt California Oil Industry’s Jobs Figures •Colorado Cities Sued Over Fracking Bans by Oil, Gas Group
Does Canada’s stance on climate change constitute moral negligence?
How could the media report, with apparent pride, Canada’s military and civil contributions to humanitarian rescue efforts in the Philippines while ignoring our nation’s commitment to ensuring that present disasters are mere prelude to greater future catastrophe?
Energy Crunch: Profits soar while temperatures fall
Last winter was the coldest for nearly 50 years. 31,000 excess deaths were attributed to the weather – up almost 30% from 12 months previously – and yet this year two thirds of households are planning to turn their heating down. If only this was down to a successful retrofitting programme.
Carbon Democracy
Episode 69 features Timothy Mitchell and Richard Heinberg. Timothy Mitchell is author of ‘Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil’. Richard speaks about his recent book ‘Snake Oil: How Fracking’s False Promise of Plenty Imperils Our Future’.
Fracking headlines
•Methane Emissions in U.S. Probably Top Estimates: Study •Top 10 beneficiaries of fracturing dollars in Congress •From sunset to new dawnColorado creates rules to reduce fracking emissions •Boom city keeps optimism as gas drilling slows •Americans Uninformed About Fracking Says New Study
Fracking headlines
•Could California’s Shale Oil Boom Be Just a Mirage? •Could fracking boom peter out sooner than DOE expects? •More mineral owners seek to join gas lawsuits •Bakken field haste fuels massive natural gas waste •Shale gas fracking a low risk to public health -UK review •Underground Carbon Dioxide Injections Triggered Earthquakes in Texas in 2009-2011 •Colorado an energy battleground as towns ban fracking
Jeremy Leggett: “Make no mistake, this is an energy civil war”
No matter who’s right in the peak oil debates, there has always been easily enough oil and gas, combined with coal, to wreck the climate and bring down civilisation.
Cap the Grid
As a species, we must learn to live within the physical limitations of the biosphere. In the electric energy sector, this requires reversing the worldwide trend of ever-expanding electricity supply grids carrying energy vast distances from more and more large, centralized power plants. “Capping the grid” is a crucial step toward reducing greenhouse gas pollution and increasing the percentage of electricity generated by renewables.
Energy transitions – headlines
•U.S. support of grid energy storage charges up •Berlin energy grid nationalisation fails in referendum •In Brazil, the wind is blowing in a new era of renewable energy •Actively cutting energy bills in Oldham – welcome to the ‘Passivhauses’ •China’s troubled shift to a green economy
The propaganda campaign against peaking fossil fuel production
The two major threats to the continued viability of the fossil fuel industries (in our current economy) are decreased public demand for their products and a decreased ability to supply them.
Energy Crunch: the good news and the bad news
The good news is that Britain’s politicians and media are finally giving energy the attention it deserves. The bad is that the frenzied political back-and-forth of the last few weeks utterly fails to grasp the intractability of rising energy costs.