George Monbiot, in a nice piece on airships, points out a neat solution to the problem of hydrogen fuel storage:
Traveling Light
Even when burning fossil fuels, the total climate-changing impact of an airship, according to researchers at the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, is 80-90% smaller than that of ordinary aircraft. But the airship [...]
Over at Econbrowser, lots of interesting graphs, speculation and interpretations regarding recent oil production declines.
Saudi oil production cuts
More speculation about Saudi Arabia
Cantarell fading quickly
James Hamilton argues against CAFE and in favor of a gasoline tax.
CAFE standards are based on the premise that auto manufacturers and consumers are making inappropriate decisions about the kind of vehicles that get produced. The clearest way to motivate this from an economic perspective would be to suggest that there are costs to using [...]
George Monbiot suggests that “The trade in carbon offsets is an excuse for business as usual”:
The problem is this. If runaway climate change is not to trigger the irreversible melting of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets and drive hundreds of millions of people from their homes, the global temperature rise must be [...]
George Monbiot points out problems with Paul Crutzen’s proposal to mitigate global warming by injecting tons of sulphur into the stratosphere.
No Quick Fix:
Challenging a Nobel laureate over a matter of science is not something you do lightly. I have hesitated and backed off, read and re-read his paper, but now I believe I can [...]
Econbrowser: Questions remain about Saudi oil:
It’s also interesting to note that these drops in Saudi production have coincided with a huge increase in Saudi drilling efforts. The graph below, taken from the Oil Drum, shows estimates of Saudi production from the U.S. Energy Information Administration (green line) and International Energy Agency (purple) along [...]
Gar W. Lipow:
“Mommy, where do carbon offsets come from?”
“Well, you see honey, when a major polluter and a consultant love money very much they express that love together in a very special way. And nine months later the consultant produces an extremely long piece of paper.”
Stuart Staniford of The Oil Drum discusses the Petroleum Review’s rather optimistic projections of future oil production based on new megaprojects coming on line over the next few years.
The executive summary is that while I think this report
was a good deal of work and is a considerable service to the public
has some improvements [...]
The BBC reports:
Building new nuclear plants is not the answer to tackling climate change or securing Britain’s energy supply, a government advisory panel has reported. The Sustainable Development Commission (SDC) report says doubling nuclear capacity would make only a small impact on reducing carbon emissions by 2035.
The body, which advises the government on the environment, [...]
A group of researchers from UC Berkeley have published a paper that tries to reconcile conflicting studies on the energy efficiency of using ethanol as a transportation fuel. From the press release:
The analysis, appearing in this week’s issue of Science, attempts to settle the ongoing debate over whether ethanol is a good substitute for gasoline [...]
“Every dollar invested in nuclear expansion will worsen climate change by buying less solution per dollar.”
John Quiggin argues that a dramatic reduction in (carbon-based) fuel use can be accomplished via an accumulation of small reductions through a combination of price responsiveness and public policy.
Adding all of these modest changes together would yield a reduction in fuel use of more than 50 per cent Some of these changes would be [...]
Kevin Drum at Washington Monthly has just wrapped up a five-part series on peak oil.
Exxon Mobil sees an oil peak.