Education

The Bakken boom — A modern day gold rush

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While the Bakken boom offers a hopeful story in which American ingenuity and nature’s endless bounty emancipate us from energy oppression and dependence on evil and oppressive foreign dictators, musings of energy independence are premature, misguided and misleading. The problem with the Bakken story as told by Crooks and others is that it lacks historical context. Referring to recent developments as an energy revolution implies that there are no lessons to be learned from history. But as Mark Twain put it, “history doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.”

Exploring humanity’s place in the journey of the universe

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The language in Journey of the Universe is something that is deeply dependent on scientific discoveries. It’s not using any kind of overt religious language. But it is suggesting, what are the grounds for environmental concern and ethics and action? We are not naming it from any particular perspective — it’s an evocation more than a preachment.

Biofuels and biomass – December 8

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-Biomass is the next biofuel ‘land grab’ on tropical forests, warn campaigners
-Climate Committee: Biomass has “no role” in electricity production without CCS
-CLIMATE CHANGE: Biofuels Are Not the Solution
-Navy’s Big Biofuel Bet: 450,000 Gallons at 4 Times the Price of Oil
-Aviation could switch to low-carbon fuel ‘sooner than thought’

A course to keep you from crashing

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Economists never told us the story of financial inequity. It took the Occupy movement to do that. And many economists still continue to tell us reassuring fairy tales about how economic growth must and will return.

So, who are you going to trust? Start with Chris Martenson, one of the lay financial analysts who did predict the banking collapse in fall 2008.

Review: The Wealth of Nature by John Michael Greer

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Having written extensively on occultism and the esoteric, and himself an adept in ritual magic, John Michael Greer is an eager student of the unexplained. Yet he’s also a sharp observer of the unexamined assumptions that people make about the physical world around them, and how these assumptions have helped land the world in its present crisis. One common presupposition is that nature is independent of the world of human economics, and thus can be treated as a disposable resource. An environmentalist and a devout follower of the druid path, Greer knows better, and he’s written several books seeking to dispel this mistaken dismissal of nature.

Wind fights solar; Triangle wins

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For me, the most delightful turn of events in the ultimate nerd-song”Particle Man” by They Might Be Giants, is that after introducing (in order of complexity) particle-man, triangle-man, universe-man, and person-man—and learning that triangle-man naturally beats particle-man in a match up—we pit person-man against triangle-man to discover that triangle wins—again. In this post, we’ll pit solar against wind and see who wins.

Escaping Thought Traps and Creating Democracy for a Small Planet

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“Solutions to global crises are within reach,” says Frances Moore Lappé. “Our challenge is to free ourselves from self-defeating thought traps so we can bring these solutions to life.” In EcoMind, Lappé helps facilitate a much needed shift. She argues that much of what is wrong with the world, from our eroding soil to our eroding democracies, results from ways of thinking that are out of sync with human nature and nature’s rhythms. Humans are doers, she says….It turns out that gap between the world we long for and the world we thought we were stuck with can be bridged after all—if we can learn to think like an ecosystem.

Recognizing good science when you see it: climate change seen by depletion scientists

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Many people involved with peak oil studies don’t often interact with serious climate science and their view of it remains linked to the distortions presented in the mainstream media.

However, a good scientist can always recognize good science when he sees it. It has been the case of Colin Campbell, founder and honorary chairman of ASPO, who stated to the audience “I am convinced” after having heard the talk on climate change by Van Ypersele at the ASPO-9 Brussels conference. It was the same for several colleagues at a recent Basel energy conference after they heard the excellent climate talk by Ian Dunlop.

De-constructing the WSJ’s front page story, “U.S. nears milestone: net fuel exporter”

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The primary contributor to the US becoming a net exporter of refined products and the primary contributor to the decline in US net oil imports is declining consumption in the US, as the US and many other developed countries have been forced, post-2005, to take a declining share of a falling volume of Global Net Exports (GNE), which are calculated in terms of Total Petroleum Liquids.

The WSJ reporters are taking a symptom of Peak Exports, i.e., declining US oil consumption, and presenting it as a positive story.