As scientists continue to revise their climate predictions for the worse, it's clear that the time has passed for the world to avoid serious consequences from global warming. With superstorms and floods competing with droughts and wildfires to break records somewhere around the world year-round, the weather is already getting pretty weird. So now, the real question is how … [Read more...]
Citing mystical vision, Obama rejects Keystone XL pipeline
Cutting short a permit review process expected to conclude this summer at earliest, President Obama today announced that he has decided to block the Keystone XL pipeline planned to carry more than 700,000 barrels a day of Canadian tar-sands crude into the country. "After a careful process of deliberation, and a prophetic vision after Easter service on Sunday, I have … [Read more...]
Cocktails at the oil crash
Set in the cocktail lounge of a hotel at Toronto's airport in the present day, Douglas Coupland's fictional vision of an oil-crisis apocalypse is so frightening because it seems so plausible. Make it a double Player One starts out as an unremarkable meeting of middle-class North American types reminiscent of Coupland's 1991 novel Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated … [Read more...]
Distance costs money: Interview with Jeff Rubin
Among the many compelling speakers at the Association for the Study of Peak Oil (ASPO-USA) conference in Washington, DC this October, only a few gave keynote addresses to the attendees. Jeff Rubin, former chief economist at CIBC World Markets and author of Why Your World Is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller: Oil and the End of Globalization, was among that elite. His talk, "Oil … [Read more...]