Climate Climate & Energy

Kenneth Deffeyes’ Beyond Oil forecasts a fast-approaching petroleum peak

Mark your calendar: annual world production of crude oil will reach its peak this coming Thanksgiving, Nov. 24. At least, that's the tongue-half-in-cheek prediction of Kenneth Deffeyes, who starts his latest book by suggesting that readers stop and give thanks for a century of plentiful supplies.

Why can’t we change our oil-sucking land-use preferences?

The other day I expressed disappointment at Kevin Drum's fifth peak oil post -- the one where he lays out his recommendations for oil policy. In my inimitably oblique and unfocused way, I was simply trying to say that I wish he'd been more imaginative.

If nothing else, peak oil is going to be a major inflection point in our collective history. It's a sharp turn in the road, and we can't see clearly around the bend. The stakes are huge, and call for a commensurate greatness of mind and expansiveness of thought.

What Drum did is basically gather the conventional wisdom in one place, without considering at all the myriad ways that the CW might be constricted and warped by the vested interests of society's current power brokers. Nor did he deign to consider things that might seem, in the current sociopolitical scene, impossible, or at least out on the fringe.

One example: U.S. suburbia, as Kunstler never tires of telling us, is built on cheap oil. It takes lots of oil to transport goods around the world to a Wal-Mart, and lots of oil for suburbanites to drive back and forth to it bazillions of times. The dominant land-use paradigm in this country is oil-sucking. If oil's running out, it's got to change, right?

Drum doesn't bother to mention the many innovative thinkers out there pondering how we can make cities greener and more attractive (the very subject of World Environment Day). He doesn't consider how we might refashion our remaining farm land and open spaces in more ecologically friendly fashion. He doesn't consider how we might encourage people to buy locally grown food and locally made goods.

Instead, we get this extraordinarily banal post on why people don't like mixed-use developments. (See also the Atrios post that preceded it and the Jim Henley post responding to it.)

It's late, so I'll just make two brief points:

Lights, Climate, Action

Schwarzenegger declares war on global warming “I say the debate is over. We know the science, we see the threat, and the time for action is now.” With those words, California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (R) yesterday defied Bush administration orthodoxy, announcing ambitious plans to reduce his state’s emissions of greenhouse gases. The Governator issued an […]

Japanese dress down to save 81 million gallons of oil in summer

What do you do if your country needs to meet targets under the Kyoto global warming protocol? You dress down.

Yup, the Japanese government is encouraging public workers to wear less in order to use less oil. Since many in Japan don dark suits in summer, they crank up the AC to maintain an average temperature of 77 degrees. Someone figured out that Japan could save 81 million gallons of oil in one summer by setting the temperature at 82. To make the warmer workplace more bearable, employees now have the okay to wear short sleeves and go sans tie.

However, one possible unintended consequence of this move is that shirt sales are up. I'm guessing that they are not organic.

Everything New Is Old Again

Wisconsin power-plant expansion could have long-term eco-consequences The fate of a Wisconsin coal-fired power plant could augur poorly for the environment, say its opponents. At issue is what does and doesn’t count as a “new” power-generating facility: Under the Clean Water Act, new facilities are subject to strict regulations on cleaning technology; an addition to […]

Salmon and Denial-Ah

Federal judge calls Bush admin’s salmon plan fishy In a strongly worded opinion, U.S. District Judge James Redden yesterday ruled that the Bush administration’s salmon-protection plan for the Columbia and Snake rivers in the Northwest is “contrary to law” because it doesn’t take into account how dams affect the fish’s chances of recovery. This is […]

Tar Wars

Canadian tar sands becoming top oil source, despite environmental harm With conventional oil reserves declining around the world, all eyes are turning to Canada, where tar sands in the north contain 175 billion barrels of proven oil reserves — almost in the neighborhood of Saudi Arabia’s 262 billion and far more than the Arctic Refuge’s […]

Pick a Little, Talk a Little

Few new ideas emerge from latest U.N. climate meetings What comes after Kyoto? That was the focus of a 190-nation, two-day seminar convened by the U.N. this week in Bonn, Germany, the first in what’s likely to be a gazillion-step process of figuring out what sort of climate-change treaty should pick up where the Kyoto […]

Everyone Knows It’s Windy

Argentine town may be model for producing hydrogen from wind The people of Pico Truncado in southern Argentina know the power of the wind that whips through their open land; it rips flags to shreds, dumps dust on clothing, and musses hair. But it also provides more than half of the town’s electricity and could […]

Power Ploy

California flirts with high-tech electricity meters, new pricing scheme California, ever the leader in innovative greenish programs, is planning yet another experiment, this time involving electricity use and pricing. With up to 15 million high-tech meters, at a cost of around $3.6 billion, three California utilities plan to meticulously track consumers’ minute-by-minute energy usage (something […]