oil

Here’s wishing you plentiful petroleum

I give you Trilby Lundberg, publisher of the Lundberg Survey of gas prices: I’m hoping that consumers will see through the rhetoric about consuming less, demanding less, as faulty. It is not a given that consuming less will be good for our economy or for our personal freedom. It is not even established for our […]

Contrary to what you might have heard

A new study by the Union of Concerned Scientists finds:

Increasing the average fuel economy of America’s new autos to 35 miles per gallon (mpg) by 2018 would save consumers $61 billion at the gas pump and increase U.S. employment by 241,000 jobs in the year 2020, including 23,900 in the auto industry ...

The study is available here.

According to the analysis, nearly $24 billion of the gasoline savings would become new revenue for automakers in 2020–paying for the improved technologies plus some profit ...

[P]utting fuel economy technology to work would also cut our oil addiction by 1.6 million barrels per day and reduce global warming pollution by more than 260 million metric tons, akin to taking nearly 40 million of today’s average cars and trucks off the road in 2020.

Umbra on biodegradable products

Dearest Umbra, With biodegradable corn-plastic products like clothes hangers, credit cards, and trash bags, we are led to believe there are good alternatives to plastic that can be thrown out guilt-free. But doesn’t all trash get put in landfills that are then hermetically sealed to prevent the bad contaminants from leaching out, but hold in […]

Energy 101

The Oil Drum has an excellent post that provides a neat framework, and then a huge series of links to specific stories that fit into the framework. The subject is energy.

Nicely done, TOD.

An oil exec gets the diagnosis right

One hesitates to agree with the CEO of a major oil company, but … I can’t really figure where Jeroen van der Veer, head of Royal Dutch Shell, is wrong in all this. He says: Energy demand is growing, and is likely to double by 2050. Oil and gas are going to become more difficult […]

The latest from Kunstler

Jim Kunstler’s heard the latest data on oil exports/imports, and he sees trouble a’comin’: The implication in [the coming dropoff in oil imports] is that the activities that have become “normal” for us during the post World War Two era will very shortly become untenable. An economy based on suburban expansion and incessant motoring is […]

Reps to discuss dropping the tax break on massive SUVs

For the “wow, about time” files: the tax write-off for Hummers might be a thing of yesteryear, if one legislator gets his way. Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore.) has introduced legislation to remove the $25,000-or-so tax break that people who drive massive SUVs and Hummers have been getting for years. The break was intended to help […]

Hardly new, but brazen nonetheless

Senate Democrats want to pay for renewables with taxes and royalties on oil companies. This pressure is causing the oil lobby to threaten higher gasoline prices: Bill Holbrook, communications director for the National Petrochemical and Refiners Association, told ABC News that there are conflicting signals about what path the nation will take coming from both […]

More than meets the eye

If you think that the current governmental and corporate interest in ethanol has something to do with global warming, think again. It is dawning on the U.S. government that (1) most of the remaining supplies of oil are in unfriendly hands, and (2) that there isn't enough oil remaining to feed a constantly growing global demand.

With oil production plateauing, governments can turn to three main strategies to maintain fuel supplies: (1) consume what's left of the planet by growing huge amounts of biofuels; (2) fry what's left of the atmosphere by converting coal to oil or exploiting dirty, expensive tars and oil sands; or (3) conquer the planet to forcably take whatever oil is left.

Michael T. Klare brings this problem right to the door of the U.S. military in his new article, "The Pentagon v. Peak Oil: How Wars of the Future May Be Fought Just to Run the Machines That Fight Them."