Wind

- Kunstler interviews Arthur E. Berman, Petroleum Geologist: Magical Thinking and Fracking (audio)
- Coal Lobby Warns Wind Farms May Blow Earth Off Orbit (video from The Onion)
- Energy.gov: Where information goes to die

In this third and final article in this series, we will discuss seven new ways of living which we can adopt as economic growth fails. They are not revolutionary (revolutions never achieve their utopian visions because of something called "human nature"). Rather, they may allow us to "muddle through" the best we can right now with what we already know how to do. We will do these things because they will work -- and we certainly need to stop doing things that don't work, and find new ways that will work.

The big oil news this week was that OPEC came to an agreement – albeit a bit of a fudge– showing something of a recovery from June’s "worst meeting ever". Last time around the group failed to agree new quotas and was upstaged two weeks later by the IEA releasing strategic reserves to offset loss of production from Libya.

The opportunity to pull Michigan out of its economic slump and deal with climate change is right in front of us. But leaders are dithering.

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.

- Keystone XL Isn't Dead Yet
- Gas exports soar, keeping U.S. price at pump high
- Cairn’s $600 Million Greenland Oil Campaign Ends in Failure
- A Shadow Climate Regime

Hall and Day (2009) report that the Energy Return on Energy Invest (EROI) for coal might be as high as 80 and that for hydropower, EROI is 40. Does this mean that coal is twice as ‘good’ as hydro? The answer is no, and in this post I will discuss how this relates to the idea of an EROI Threshold

-Onshore wind energy to reach parity with fossil-fuel electricity by 2016
-Gas Companies Caught Using Military Tactics To Overcome Drilling Concerns
-EU biofuel target seen driving species loss: study
-New study suggests EU biofuels are as carbon intensive as petrol
-Local Power: Boulder Considers Moving Off the Grid

US oil prices rose this week on news that the glut of crude stocks at Cushing Oklahoma, which has depressed the benchmark WTI contract for months, may soon be drained. Enbridge is to buy the Seaway pipeline which runs from the Houston area to Cushing, and plans to reverse its flow.

At first glance, Jan Lundberg and Amanda Kovattana seem like unlikely kindred spirits. He’s a former oil analyst turned whistleblower and rock musician, while she’s a British-educated Thai émigré who makes her living helping people become organized. Yet their similarities run deep, beginning with a profound concern for the planet and a flair for writing. Indeed, both are indispensable contributors to one of the top news sites on energy and the environment, Energy Bulletin. Both also happen to be accomplished memoirists, and their memoirs offer rare insights into family relationships, the vicissitudes of wealth and the quandary of being an environmentalist in an environmentally apathetic age.

The film The Last Mountain has it all: a human story of ordinary citizens fighting a soulless and unaccountable coal corporation; an urgency as the last mountain in the Coal River Valley is eyed by Big Coal for surface mining; a history and context for the people's claim to the rights of the commons; activism in the form of petitioning the government as well as civil disobedience; the role of business, profit, labor and economy as labor power is eroded and corporate profits soar; the eco-system, heritage, and culture of the region; and a new way forward proposed by the people themselves. It's the best documentary I've seen on mountain top removal. But really, it's about so much more and has come together perfectly as a gestalt, a meme for our times.

The Last Mountain, June 2011, 95 minutes, Dada Films, Directed by Bill Haney.

Wind power isn't only about industrial scale turbines. Restoring wind powered mills, like Callington Mill in Oatlands, Tasmania, offers a way to increase tourism, local food and local economies while creating jobs and building resilience. A win-win-win!

“Imagining a world without oil” describes in stark detail what might happen if one day the world decided to decommission all its oil tankers, rigs, pipelines and strategic reserves. The authors, environmental scientist Steve Hallett and journalist John Wright, expect that we’d initially see sky-high prices and long lines at pumps. After a few weeks, fuel wouldn’t be had at any price and even first-world citizens would struggle to stay fed and out of the elements. This is no Hollywood doomsday scenario—it’s a levelheaded extrapolation from current trends in the fast deteriorating world energy situation. [An essay prefiguring the book originally appeared in The Washington Post.]

How fast do we need to transition off of fossil fuels? What industrial capacity is available today for different alternative energy technologies and what is likely to be available in the future? What might we do if we can't replace fossil fuels with alternatives fast enough, and what might the consequences be? I finally got around to re-doing these calculations, and wanted to go through the numbers.

Was I surprised that last issue’s column, Can Renewables Outshine Fossil Fuels?, elicited a strong reaction, with written responses of support and derision? Not at all. It’s an issue that continues to divide the environmental community, and one which keeps us from moving forward as quickly as possible to conserve resources and relocalize as an era of cheap, concentrated, easy-to-get energy comes to an end.