Climate Climate & Energy

Rebels slash production production take hostages in Nigeria.

Everyone's favorite fungible commodity is causing some real trouble in Nigeria, where rebels claiming to represent "ethnic Ijaw communities" are laying siege to property owned by Royal Dutch Shell, the Guardian reports. There's even a hostage crisis brewing:

The group of three Americans, two Thais, two Egyptians, a Filipino, and a Briton -- John Hudspith -- were seized by up to 40 gunmen who stormed a pipe-laying barge. In emails to news agencies, the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (Mend) said its goal was to punish oil corporations and the government for siphoning off the region's wealth without returning anything to its impoverished ethnic Ijaw communities; as well as saying the hostages' fate had yet to be decided, the movement also warned that they might end up being killed in crossfire with the army.

The rebels managed to halt about a fifth of supply in Nigeria, which according to the Wall Street Journal is "Africa's leading oil exporter and the U.S.'s fifth-largest supplier, usually exporting 2.5 million barrels daily." Crude surged past the $60/barrel mark on the news.

I wonder what ol' Shotgun Dick Cheney thinks of all this.

Below the Melt

Greenland ice sheet melting speedily, making seas rise faster New research indicates that the Greenland ice sheet is melting faster than we thought, will be gone sooner than we thought, and may raise sea levels more than we thought. Whee! The new study, published in Science, says Greenland’s glaciers — among the earth’s largest freshwater […]

Jon Stewart interviews an oil analyst, who basically blows it

A couple days ago, Jon Stewart interviewed Peter Tertzakian, author of A Thousand Barrels a Second: The Coming Oil Break Point and the Challenges Facing an Energy Dependent World. (You can watch the interview here.)

I haven't read the book, so I don't know what Tertzakian's general outlook is, but I can tell you that on television his outlook is boooring. It's highly unfortunate: The Daily Show reaches an extremely influential demographic, and the peak-oil issue desperately needs a higher profile on the cultural scene. A Daily Show interview is not the time for measured analysis; it's the time to be funny and flamboyant and, OK, a little alarmist. We need people to pay attention.

But Tertzakian was soporific, droning on about energy "break points" and how we've weathered the previous ones pretty well, and how even though there's no obvious alternative, we'll muddle through, blah blah zzzz ... I suspect he hasn't been on TV much.

My one substantive critique was that he referred several times to the lack of an alternative energy source that could scale to oil's breadth and depth. But what the public needs to understand is that we don't need a single, silver-bullet alternative. What can replace oil is a diversity of small-scale sources (wind, solar, biothermal, hydro, cogeneration) appropriate to local conditions. We need to replace a single, concentrated source of power -- both physical and political power -- with a decentralized multiplicity of sources. This will be a boon -- again, both physically and politically.

I wish everyone talking publicly about oil could at least get on the same page on that one talking point.

An excerpt from Missing Mountains, a new book about mountaintop-removal mining

Missing Mountains, Wind Publications, 220 pgs., 2005. In August of 2002, Amanda Moore, a lawyer for the Appalachian Citizens Law Center, took on what she thought was a cut-and-dried legal matter for Granville Lee Burke, a resident of Chopping Branch Hollow in eastern Kentucky. Earlier that year, a flood that wreaked havoc throughout the hollow […]

Plan the rockingest party ever to celebrate Kyoto’s first birthday

It seems like just yesterday that the Kyoto Protocol came into force, only to languish in toothless uncertainty as major powers including the U.S., Australia, Canada, and the U.K. sought to tank it in various ways. But it’s been a whole year! Can you believe it? Party like Bush signed on. Photo: stock.xchng. Yes, today […]

Mountaintop-removal mining is devastating Appalachia, but residents are fighting back

This article was originally published in Orion Magazine. Not since the glaciers pushed toward these ridgelines a million years ago have the Appalachian Mountains been as threatened as they are today. But the coal-extraction process decimating this landscape, known as mountaintop removal, has generated little press beyond the region. A mountaintop no more.Photo: Vivian Stockman/SouthWings.The […]

Have They Asked the Conservative Think Tanks About This?

Climate change really screwing things up, say scientists around the world Global warming, neither a far-off abstraction nor the myth some (still!) claim it to be, is already causing mayhem worldwide, according to the latest rash of studies on the topic. In the late 20th century, the Northern Hemisphere experienced its most sustained warm stretch […]

The Bear Necessitates

Feds to consider listing polar bears as threatened Congressional Republicans waging jihad against the Endangered Species Act may soon have a new reason to hate it: The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is considering giving polar bears federal endangered-species protections because climate change is melting their Arctic sea-ice habitat. If the feds are compelled to […]

The Sweden Hereafter

Sweden aims to be oil-free in 15 years It’s official: Sweden is the coolest … country … evar. Already widely admired for meatballs, Ikea, and, um, other Swedish stuff, the country has now announced its aim to have an oil-free economy by 2020. The Swedes cut the percentage of their energy coming from oil from […]

As snowy peaks get warmer, ski industry tries to stave off extinction

With the Olympics starting this week, all eyes are on the slopes of Turin. But skiing and snowboarding could disappear from our collective culture in about 50 years, if global-warming forecasts ring true. In a lot of popular ski areas, there simply won’t be any snow. It’s all downhill from here. Photo: stock.xchng. It’s already […]