Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
•Study: Shale Gas Fracking Taints Rivers in Pennsylvania •Fracking ‘linked to biggest Oklahoma earthquake’ •Fracking communities should get incentives, says minister •US shale gas to heat British homes within five years
Three years ago, my wife and I decided to redirect our farming efforts to create a CSA. Our farm is located in some of the most spectacularly beautiful scenery in the whole of this country. When folks think about Iowa, the first picture that comes to mind is one of immense fields of corn broken only by the occasional little town and its grain elevators that stand like towering parapets over their own private prairie landscapes. Here in the extreme northeastern corner of Iowa, it is so antithetical to that perception, you feel as if you are in a different state altogether. A different state altogether – Allamakee County is all that and more.
Help us fight back against Big Oil’s billion-dollar spin machine by pre-ordering and participating in the writing and editing of Richard Heinberg’s next book, ‘SNAKE OIL! How Big Energy’s Promise of Plenty Imperils Our Future’.
With the media awash in stories telling us how much oil is being discovered around the world, there is one word which the optimists quoted in these stories refuse to utter: Depletion.
•Hydrocarbons and Depletion: Shale gas technology to the rescue? •The great oil swindle •Shale Monster •Lord Browne promises to invest ‘whatever it takes’ in UK fracking •Ban Hydraulic Fracturing in New Mexico
I went to a meeting earlier this winter in the Colorado Governor’s Office. I’m not a regular. The Governor, John Hickenlooper, Hick to his friends, had called the meeting with Boulder County Commissioners to discuss the county’s draft regulations governing the recovery of oil and gas found in the county’s deep underground shale formations. The fact is that most of the state is underlain by these ancient and organically rich seabeds. All are ripe for exploitation through the use of the industry’s new mining technique called horizontal fracking.
Governments and financial analysts who think unconventional fossil fuels such as bitumen, shale gas and shale oil can usher in an era of prosperity and energy plenty are dangerously deluded, concludes a groundbreaking report by one of Canada’s top energy analysts.
In-depth interview with Nobel Laureate Robert B. Laughlin on his book "Powering the Future: How We Will Eventually Solve the Energy Crisis and Fuel the Civilization of Tomorrow." Dr. Rose M. Cory’s new science on positive feedback loop discovered in the melting Arctic.
The way the oil industry is touting gains in U.S. crude production, you would think that production is soaring to new all-time highs. But the facts say otherwise.
•Shale Gas and Tight Oil: Boom? Bust? Or Just a Petering Out? •ENERGY: Overdevelopment and the Delusion of Endless Growth, Part 3 – The Bad Idea of Fracking, with Sandra Steingraber (audio) •Germany moves to allow controversial shale gas drilling •Colorado Will Sue Fort Collins Over Fracking Ban •Shale falls short for US energy security •"Frackademia" – MIT’s Ernest Moniz, Obama’s Top Candidate for Energy Secretary, Oversees Pro-Industry-Funded Research
It’s been a little more than a year since I launched the present series of posts on the end of America’s global empire and the future of democracy in the wake of this nation’s imperial age. Over the next few posts I plan on wrapping that theme up and moving on. However traumatic the decline and fall of the American empire turns out to be, after all, it’s just one part of the broader trajectory that this blog seeks to explore, and other parts of that trajectory deserve discussion as well.
Almost exactly nine months ago on May 22, 2012, I wrote an editorial in the Fort Collins Coloradoan newspaper, Fort Colllins Should Ban Fracking. And yesterday, on Feb. 19, a sharply divided Fort Collins City Council voted 5-2 to ban fracking in the City of Fort Collins.
