peak oil
-
How to profit from the coming ecopocalypse
While a quarter of Americans have a net worth of zero, Jeremy Grantham controls a hedge fund worth $107 billion, and he has a message for the world: Resource scarcity, peak oil, and climate change could mean big bucks for those who can get out ahead of the disaster. Well, okay, not BIG bucks — […]
-
Students successfully rally to juxtapose Exxon arch-nemesis with Exxon CEO as commencement speaker
The CEO of America's largest and most profitable company is invited to be the commencement speaker at one of the country's oldest technological universities — you would think everyone would be pumped! But no, the students at Worcester Polytechnic Institute responded to the secret deal to bring the head of WPI mega-donor Exxon Mobile to […]
-
FedEx’s Republican CEO wants you to buy an electric car [VIDEO]
Clean energy: not a partisan issue, says FedEx's CEO. That's why he commissioned this slick little promo, which sums up everything that's wrong with our current transportation infrastructure but stops just short of mentioning peak oil. That's OK, because the facts speak for themselves: The U.S. uses a quarter of the world's oil. Seventy percent […]
-
In face of ‘peak everything,’ governments shrug at environmental cost of energy
Less than a year after the Deepwater Horizon disaster, the U.S. government has begun issuing new permits for deepwater drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. Pundits think that despite a pause in the "nuclear renaissance," the same thing could happen to nuclear power plants in the wake of Fukushima, at least outside the U.S. The […]
-
Peak Oil, not Libya, is the reason you’re paying more at the pump
The further into the post-carbon age we grind, the more mainstream the notion of peak oil becomes. Long derided because it runs contrary to the only two things more American than football and corn syrup — that would be endless economic expansion and our right to commute 90 minutes a day, should we so choose […]
-
Getting to 100 percent renewables in 20 years
Boffins at the Institute for Policy Research and Development in London have calculated just how much fossil fuel we have to burn to get to the point that we never have to burn them again. Their paper, "A Solar Transition is Possible," argues that in a best-case scenario, "a renewable energy infrastructure could double present […]
-
I raise pigs on annual pasture crops. Am I farming sustainably?
Bob Comis with his porkers. Will they leave the land more productive than they found it? Photo: Zach Phillips The concept of sustainability isn’t very useful as a critique of industrial agriculture — all you have to do is create a friendly definition of “sustainable,” and the critique is turned on its head. However, sustainability […]
-
James Howard Kunstler: The old American dream is a nightmare
Photo: Charlie SamuelsThe Great Depression gave rise to hobos and Hoovervilles. The Roaring Nineties brought us what New York Times columnist David Brooks termed “bobos in paradise.” Now our current round of layoffs and foreclosures has unceremoniously transferred millions of folks from the “affluent” to the “afflicted” category, exiling them from Brooks’s mythical exurban Eden. […]
-
The Climate Post: Obama’s new budget would make Big Oil pay for clean energy
The president gives a preview of his budget in his weekly address.Republicans are vowing to fight President Obama’s newly released budget for the 2012 fiscal year. Among other things, the new budget includes a few significant changes to spending on climate and energy research. In the energy sector, it calls for slashing tax breaks and loopholes for fossil […]