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"Planet Forward": PBS's viewer-driven program on getting away from fossil fuels - this Wednesday
Planet Forward
"Planet Forward" is an innovative, viewer-driven program that debuts on the web first and then moves to television, in a primetime PBS special on April 15th (check local listings for exact show times) just a week ahead of Earth Day, and then moves back to the web. Hosted by Emmy Award-winning CNN veteran Frank Sesno, Planet Forward is driven by the power of ideas, as citizens make their case for what they think about the nation's energy future.

The discussion starts online, then builds to a new kind of television show, which in turn drives the online conversation. It's web to television and back again. An ongoing conversation driven by issues, and made possible by new and creative media technologies.

The Planet Forward web site will revolve around citizen and expert submissions, reflecting a wide range of interests, expertise and opinion.

The television show will feature the best online submissions, which will be discussed and debated by a diverse panel of experts, scientists, business leaders and policymakers in a nationally televised PBS special, taped in front of a live audience at The George Washington University. The special will feature A-list experts, scientists, policymakers and business leaders, as well as citizen journalists selected from the Planet Forward website.
(April 2009)

PBS’ Planet Forward brings a new kind of show to explore new kinds of energy
Jonathan Hiskes, Grist
Three things to know about Planet Forward, the PBS special about America’s energy future that runs at 8 p.m. Wednesday:

1. Social media ... used well! In the interest of bringing “citizens and their ideas together with decision makers,” Planetforward.org asked for videos from folks with innovative energy ideas and collected wide-ranging responses. A solar-voltaic researcher opens his home electricity bill on camera to show the payment he earned by using rooftop panels to produce excess electricity. Rochester, N.Y., Girl Scouts make their own plea for solar energy. Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley talks up nuclear energy. By keeping the editing tight, host Frank Sesno uses the short clips as discussion-starters with his guests.

2. High-profile “gets.” The show begins with a lively panel debate that includes one of former president Bush’s top environmental advisers, Council on Environmental Quality Chairman James Connaughton. It ends with the Obama administration’s top energy adviser, Carol Browner. Both face substantive questions from Sesno and his guests. After a video clip about mountaintop-removal mining, panelist L. Hunter Lovins calls out Connaughton: “Jim, you just saw a mountaintop being ripped into a valley. You cannot say that coal is clean.”

(He responds by talking about cutting air pollutants and eventually carbon dioxide emissions, and about using coal power to lift people out of poverty, but not about the damages of mountaintop-removal mining.)

3. The model works. Sesno, a former CNN Washington Bureau Chief, creates a rapid-fire cable-news-paced disusssion that succeeds in being both informative and civil (why hasn’t anyone else though of that?).
(14 April 2009)

Monbiot: We spend millions on smallpox, but nothing on this far greater threat
George Monbiot, Guardian
Our leaders' approach to risk is unbalanced: huge resources to guard against an extinct disease, and nothing on oil running out
Here's how the British government describes the risk of a smallpox outbreak. "We are currently at alert level O. Smallpox remains eradicated. No credible threat of a smallpox release."

So, in response to this non-existent threat, it has published 122 pages of central plans. Each of the nine English regions maintains a Smallpox Diagnosis and Response Group, which in turn supports five Smallpox Management and Response Teams, one of which is on duty at all times.

... There is one respect in which the government's approach seems utterly bonkers: a threat with a high likelihood of occurrence, for which it refuses to make any plans at all. I've been banging on about this for a while, with my usual absence of results. But now I've received a letter that makes its dismissive response look like outright lunacy.

There is nothing certain about the hypothesis that global supplies of conventional petroleum might soon stop growing and then go into decline. There is a large body of expert opinion, marshalling impressive statistics, which is convinced that peak oil is imminent. There is also a large body of expert opinion, marshalling impressive statistics, which insists that it's a long way off. I don't know who to believe. The key data - the true extent of reserves in the Opec nations - is a state secret. Anyone who tells you that oil supplies will definitely peak by a certain date or definitely won't peak ever is a fraud: the information required to make these assessments does not exist.

... The only explanation I can suggest is that the concept of insufficient oil cannot be accommodated within the government's worldview. Its response to a smallpox epidemic accords with its messianic tendencies: government as superman, defending us from crackpots carrying vampire pathogens. The idea that we might be undone by an issue as mundane and unresponsive as resource depletion just doesn't fit.

But at least we know where we stand: we'll have to make our own contingency plans.
(14 April 2009)

Has OECD oil consumption peaked?
Rune Likvern, The Oil Drum: Europe
[GRAPHIC]

The above diagram shows that the pattern of growth in oil consumption has varied greatly for different groupings of countries. Oil consumption in China and India has continued to grow, whether or not oil prices rose greatly. Oil consumption also continued to grow in the "Others" category, which includes many of the oil producing nations. Oil consumption in the Former Soviet Union also followed a pattern somewhat independent of world oil prices. It was only the OECD whose consumption changed significantly as world oil prices changed.

Based on this comparison, it seems to me that OECD consumption is far more affected by oil price changes than the consumption of other countries. Based on data shown in this post, it seems to me that OECD economies can only absorb a price increase of US$10 per barrel in a year, without experiencing slowdowns in their economies and a reduction in oil consumption. Non-OECD economies (including BRIC countries) are more resilient, and are more likely to continue to show growing consumption.

Below the fold, I examine similarities and differences in oil consumption patterns of OECD and Non-OECD countries and offer my view as to what the future may hold.
(14 April 2009)

Green Ink: Big Oil, Small Cars, and Beach Bars
Keith Johnson, Environmental Capital, Wall Street Journal
Crude oil futures rebounded to almost $51 on the back of gains in equity markets, a harbinger of industrial recovery, Bloomberg reports.

The oil scramble heats up. Total signs a deal to process Venezuelan crude for the Chinese market, and also ups the ante in its Canadian oil-sands takeover bid, both in the WSJ. Russia’s Lukoil, frustrated at home, sets its sights on the promising waters off Ghana, in Bloomberg. Not all unconventional plays are appealing, though: Shell nixes a coal-to-liquids and oil-shale deal in China, in the WSJ.

Speaking of nixing–the Commerce Department kills the planned Broadwater LNG terminal in Long Island, arguing that environmental impacts outweigh regional energy gains, in AP.

George Monbiot goes survivalist: Why does the U.K., which has contingency plans for every eventuality, have no plan whatsoever for peak oil?, in The Guardian.
(14 April 2009)