Stories archived in Friday, January 20, 2012

- EU prepares unprecedented attack on Iranian economy
- Barrelling towards fuel shortages
- An Iran war is brewing from mutual ignorance and chronic miscalculation

- Fossil fuel subsidies: a tour of the data
- Natural gas galore?
- US Thirst for Fossil Fuels is Decimating Nature's Wildlife: Report
- Fracking the World: Energy Companies Set Their Sights Globally

- Boston Globe on McKibben: The man who crushed the Keystone XL pipeline
- David Suzuki: What’s So Radical About Caring for the Earth and Opposing Enbridge's Northern Gateway Pipeline?
- After Keystone XL Decision, Don't Believe GOP Hype on Energy

The latest scientific revolution is in planetary science. It seems almost unbelievable that just some decades ago people were still debating on whether extrasolar planets actually existed. Today, we are discovering so many of them that it is now believed that almost every star in the galaxy has planets.

The new science of planetary systems gives us a pretty clear view of how we can destroy our civilization by upsetting the delicate balance of the factors that keep our planet alive and friendly to us. We can do it in more than one way, but the most effective one is to continue to emit greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. So, once you have looked at the stars, come back to Earth and start doing something because we are all in trouble.

This Wednesday afternoon, the Obama administration rejected the permit for Keystone XL, a 1,700 mile oil pipeline that would have run from the tar sands of Alberta to refineries on the Gulf of Mexico. The announcement is a huge victory for the grassroots climate movement. While the fight to stop the Keystone XL pipeline is over for now, the political battle over the consequences of Obama's decision is just beginning. Big Oil front groups like the American Petroleum Institute and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce are already spending millions of dollars on TV ads to bash the President over Keystone XL.

Global oil consumption fell 300,000 barrels/day in Q4 of 2011 compared to the same period in 2010 according to the IEA's monthly oil report released this week. This was the first such fall since 2009 and reflects renewed economic weakness.

An peak oil report for the Australian government has just surfaced. Although the report was finished in 2009, it apparently was never released to the public and does not appear on a government website.

Conclusion: "the prospects for the potential supply of world conventional petroleum liquids can be summarised as ‘flattish to slightly up for another eight years or longer (depending on the duration of the global economic slowdown) and then down’. Such a finding poses challenges for global transport and more generally, given the magnitude of the downturn foreseen for the rest of the century, and given the inertias inherent in our energy systems and transport vehicle fleets"

(Excerpts. Link to complete report.)