Industry

Bye bye nukes in Japan by 2012

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A new report from Greenpeace calls for the complete closure of all Japanese nuclear power plants by 2012. The report was released at the same time as the new Prime Minister, Yoshihiko Noda, was making his first policy speech to parliament calling for the restart of all reactors that are currently offline due to routine safety checks and maintenance.

Oil Sands: Canada’s 10 ethical challenges

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Canada has joined the ranks of exporting oil nations and now supplies more petroleum to the United States than Mexico or Saudi Arabia. The unconventional character of mined bitumen as well as the startling revenue it generates for government coffers has irrevocably changed the country. Five per cent of the nation’s GDP comes from oil while bitumen makes up 25 per cent of the nation’s exports. As the wild debate about the Keystone XL pipeline illustrates, Canada’s $200-billion energy project has also become a global lightning rod. No oil exporting nation, whether Christian or Muslim, is immune from the corrosive influence of oil money and its dirty politics. Yet Canada has anointed bitumen as the nation’s new “economic engine” without setting clear public policy goals or assessing the economic risks.

Review of Lieutenant Colonel Fleming’s U.S. Army War College thesis on Peak Oil

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Peak Oil predictions range from the year 2000 to 2100 with the highest concentration of forecasts from 2005 to 2016. Confidence in international oil reserves data is lacking. As such, different forecasters make different assumptions about future undiscovered oil amounts and oil reserves, resulting in a wide range of peak oil estimates. Viewing this wide time disparity in forecasts as problematic, the research objective was to look for an economic cross-check indicator, metric, or alternative data-based means to corroborate or refute existing peak oil estimates.

Jeremy Rifkin: The Third Industrial Revolution

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The world is doomed to repeat four-year cycles of booms followed by crashes if we don’t get off oil, Jeremy Rifkin warned a Climate One audience in San Francisco on October 3. The solution, what he calls the Third Industrial Revolution, is the “Energy Internet,” a nervous system linking millions of small renewable energy producers.

Fracking and coalbed methane: Unconventional gas in the UK

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When gas fracking and other “unconventional” energy resources are discussed in the media the focus is usually on the technology used to produced the energy, or the impact this might have on the environment. In fact, the significant feature of the exploitation of unconventional energy resources is that our present energy situation is so precarious that companies and governments consider these valid energy sources; public interest demands that this aspect of the problem be examined.

Where did the President’s mojo go?

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Increasingly, those of us who were ready to move with President Obama four years ago are deciding to leave normal channels and find new forms of action. Here’s an example: by year’s end the president has said he will make a decision on the Keystone XL pipeline, which would carry crude oil from the tar sands of northern Alberta to the Gulf of Mexico.

The nation’s top climate scientists sent the administration a letter indicating that such a development would be disastrous for the climate. … But every indication from this administration suggests that it is prepared to grant the necessary permission for a project that has the enthusiastic backing of the Chamber of Commerce, and in which the Koch Brothers have a “direct and substantial interest.”

The energy expert you shouldn’t trust

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Daniel Yergin has written The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World, designed to provide information that policy-makers can rely upon in shaping energy policy for the decades ahead.

This could be a dangerous reliance, for Yergin is an advocate for the fossil fuel community, not an honest broker of information. Nearly all the data cited in the book is from his company and is proprietary and non-public, so it can’t be verified or challenged. He doesn’t appear to take seriously the views of people he doesn’t agree with, and they are not included in his extensive bibliography or interviewee list.