Biomass

- The Economist: How Ernest Dichter, an acolyte of Sigmund Freud, revolutionised marketing
- Corporate monopolies 'may dominate green economy'
- Ugo Bardi: The invisible toothpaste: overselling science
- The Arctic Will Burn

OPEC head Abdullah El-Badri warned European leaders on Wednesday against imposing sanctions on Iranian oil, stating that the 865,000 barrels a day which goes mostly to Southern Europe would be difficult to replace. Global supply is already tight and oil prices remain stubbornly high despite the chronic Euro-crisis...

As temperatures dropped in Britain this week, the political heat over rising energy bills intensified. Prime Minister David Cameron hauled in the utility bosses and demanded action. Cameron claimed “everything that can be done will be done to help people bring their energy bills down...

Bill McKibben's latest book is a well-chosen and arranged collection of climate-related writings by the likes of James Hansen, Al Gore and George Monbiot, which McKibben edits and introduces. Significantly, the book contains writings by Inhofe and his ilk as well, the better to understand “the lines of attack climate deniers have used over and over,” in McKibben’s words,

The urban infrastructure of the post-carbon future will need to rediscover and utilize lost technologies and processes from history.

Integrated waste-to-energy combined heat and power systems can meet essential needs for food, clean water, public health and sufficient electrification for elevators and public transportation in a well-planned eco-city and provide a modest amount of energy for local light industry. When considering how much energy would be available, it would be misleading to look at total city energy use as planners do with today’s centralized utilities. Instead, it would be more helpful to examine how much energy you and your family could produce yourselves with a small, household anaerobic digester and gasifier and home combined heat and power system.

If biomass can help power plant owners ease away from coal faster, that is certainly a good thing. The Dominion announcement is particularly relevant given the number of planned plant retirements in the coal industry – there are currently 190 generators around the U.S. set to be shut down, and there’s a dwindling appetite to replace them with more coal.

I'm not popular with environmentalists when I tell them that renewables can only provide a small fraction of the energy that fossil fuels do in powering industrial civilization. In fact, I was recently called a liar at the screening of an anti-nuke film for suggesting so.

I got serious about cutting gas heating costs after losing my job as a research scientist last year, but now I’m paying more for each unit of natural gas delivered to my house. This was odd, so I had to look a little deeper. After some investigation I found that we are paying a lot more for each hundred cubic feet (CCF) of natural gas than our neighbors because we use so much less than they do. I’m being penalized for conserving gas, so my local gas utility is working against me.

- Protests Against Forced Eviction from US-Backed Coal Mine Continue in Bangladesh
- Shell and Cairn Energy Announce 'Risky' Drilling Plans in Arctic
- Why is the UK backing biomass power?

The Energy Report aligns with several others in recent years in confidently claiming that we could transition to full reliance on renewable energy, without any disruption of high material living standards or the pursuit of economic growth. These reports are typically quite impressive involving glossy formats with lots of coloured graphs and pictures, a large cast of heavy-weight authors, and a long list of high-powered endorsements.

Reviews of three novels set in the wake of the oil age:
- Player One by Douglas Coupland
- Ship Breaker by Paolo Bacigalupi
- Afterlight by Alex Scarrow.

Helping the public to reduce wood smoke by improving their wood burning technique is virtually unexplored territory. The wide distribution of high quality public information would give responsible wood burners the tools they need to improve their wood burning practice, regardless of the technology they use.

The only way that biomass achieves carbon neutrality is if growing forests sequester — that is, absorb from the atmosphere — as much or more carbon dioxide than is released in the burning process...It takes only seconds to burn a tree’s worth of wood, and decades for that tree to grow back and sequester the same amount of carbon.

The opening paragraph of some newspaper and magazine articles about wood heating make the claim that more households are burning wood due to the high cost of conventional energy sources. This assumption is logical enough considering there is plenty of income insecurity and increasing costs lately. But a review of the few available sources of statistics calls this conclusion into question.