The magazine on peak oil and the Transition movement
Move over OPEC, North America is about to become a net exporter of oil. At least that’s the supposed good news from the International Energy Agency’s latest outlook. According to the IEA, the drilling boom for shale oil is putting US production on track to pass Saudi Arabia. North of the border, output from Alberta’s oil sands is expected to notch a similarly grand expansion. Notions of energy independence, however far fetched they may seem today, play well to the IEA’s target … [Read more...]
As everyone is aware by now, the US is headed towards energy independence 2030, thanks to unconventional sources of oil and gas. If you believe the mainstream media, that is. However, if you know anything about energy, the happy talk that energy from tar sands, fracking and deepwater oil will replace all of America's imports today and in the future is clearly too good to be true. But we can only understand the real problem with America's alleged energy boom if we take it from a … [Read more...]
How many Saudi Arabias did you say that was? It's hard to keep up these days with claims by oil and gas drillers about how many Saudi Arabia-sized reserves of tar sands oil/shale oil/deepwater oil/hydrofracked gas that North America is now allegedly able to access due to the smarts of petroleum geologists and the tenacity of oilmen. "Because of better technology, notably breakthroughs in drilling, the US all of a sudden realizes it is sitting on a century’s worth of gas supply," writes … [Read more...]
While attending a conference for solar energy companies from the Mid-Atlantic states held last week in Washington, DC, I picked up a copy of The Hill, a newspaper for Washington insiders that comes out daily when Congress is in session. And I marveled at the full page ads taken out by big government contractors and industry lobby groups and directed at members of Congress and their staffs. Just another way that corporations act like people -- people with huge budgets for issues ads, that … [Read more...]
James Hansen, NASA’s lead climate scientist, says if TransCanada Pipeline’s Keystone XL mega-project connecting Alberta tar sand producers to Gulf Coast refineries is approved, it is game over for the planet. It certainly won’t be game over for Alberta’s oil patch or the thousands of North American steel workers who will build the massive pipeline. And I rather doubt it will be game over for the planet. If Hansen is worried about emissions growth, he just has to look at where the … [Read more...]
Let us return for a moment to election night 2008. As I sat in our farm house in Pennsylvania, watching Barack Obama's victory speech, I turned my head aside so my wife would not see the tears in my eyes. I suspect that millions cried. It was a great day for America. We had great hopes for Barack Obama - perhaps our dreams were unrealistic - he is only human. But it is appropriate, it is right, in a period honoring Martin Luther King, to recall the hopes and dreams of that evening. We had … [Read more...]
I'm their target audience. I already care about climate change. And I don't like Big Oil. Yet, it took Bill McKibben and more than 150 other activists getting arrested at the White House for me to finally care about the tar sands pipeline. Before that, I had five reasons to leave this particular issue to somebody else: Pipelines are boring. With the Environmental Protection Agency reporting up to 24,000 oil spills each year, plenty of crude must mess up dry land, but it lacks the … [Read more...]
I was pleasantly surprised to see that Michael Brune's book Coming Clean: Breaking America's Addiction to Oil and Coal, just released in a revised edition to talk about the Deepwater Horizon spill, more or less starts with peak oil. Why surprised? Because mainstream environmentalists often shy away from the topic. Maybe the idea that cheap oil is running out and that the world doesn't have anything to replace it with except a little clean energy and a lot of conservation, cutting back and … [Read more...]
As families gather around Thanksgiving tables to voice the things they're thankful for—usually family, friends, "this time together"—I'll be offering my thanks for oil. Not for the olive oil that might be used to sauté some of our veggies, though I'm thankful for that too. No, I'm talking about petroleum. When we think about oil we mostly see it as gasoline, or lubricant for a car. Petroleum so infuses every aspect of our modern life that its presence fades into the background. Oil is to … [Read more...]
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