07/22/2010

On the Bayou

I was asked this week to write something for a fishermen’s publication about the BP oil spew. Here’s what I sent them:

I was in the Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana in the weeks after the Deepwater Horizon blew out. I’m an environmentalist; I work for Greenpeace. I was there to see for myself what was going on and to talk with people about the consequences of the blowout.

In those weeks, there was much we didn’t know. There’s much we still don’t know.
Here are some of the things I saw.

On Friday, 30 April, I stood at the edge of a crowd of fishermen as they met with NOAA administrator Jane Lubchenco and Congressman Charlie Melancon (D-LA). The oil spill had yet to come ashore. Neither BP nor the federal government had been providing much information about the spill. (At that time, both BP and the feds were still claiming that only 5,000 barrels per day were leaking from the well.)
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By floegel | Posted in Commentary, Oil | Tagged , , , | Comments (0)
07/15/2010

Whistling Past the Gas Station

I started writing about peak oil in this space in 1999; the last time I wrote about it (if I can believe my own search engine) was May 2008. Why so quiet lately?

The recession. In that May 2008 post, I noted that Goldman Sachs was predicting an oil price of $200/barrel in 2010. But that was May 2008 and by Election Day of that year, the economy had solidly tanked, destroying demand for oil along the way. The price of oil today is around $77/barrel. Even Goldman Sachs gets a money question wrong once in a while.

What happens when (if?) the global recession ends and demand rebounds? Lloyd’s of London, the insurance market that has been the world’s leading authority on business risk for the past 300 years this month predicted “catastrophic consequences” for businesses that fail to adequately prepare for the effects of peak oil.
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By floegel | Posted in Commentary, Energy, Iraq Invasion, Peak Oil | Tagged , | Comments (0)
07/08/2010

HD4

Next Tuesday is the fourth annual Hansen Day – or HD4 – how do you plan to commemorate it?

What’s “Hansen Day”? Hansen Day – or what should be known as Hansen Day – is July 13. It was on that date in 2006 that NASA scientist and leading climate change
expert James Hansen wrote in the New York Review of Books: “…we have at most ten years—not ten years to decide upon action, but ten years to alter fundamentally the trajectory of global greenhouse emissions. Our previous decade of inaction has made the task more difficult, since emissions in the developing world are accelerating.” (The entire article is worth reading, or re-reading.)

Statistics in the article still surprise me. How could I have forgotten? Warmer isotherms – the bands in which given temperatures dominate – are moving toward the poles at 35 miles per decade, while species that depend on those isotherms are migrating at four miles per decade. If we don’t change our ways – and we haven’t since Dr. Hansen published the article – isotherms will be moving at 70 miles per decade by this century’s end, a recipe for mass extinction.

The same business-as-usual scenario may yield an increase in sea levels of 80 feet (!) by the end of the century, wiping out every coastal city in the world, sending hundreds of millions of people scrambling and setting off global warfare. It seems too impossibly catastrophic to be true, so we ignore it and do nothing.
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By floegel | Posted in Commentary, Global Warming | Tagged , | Comments (0)
07/01/2010

Obama’s a Fool (Part II)

I was going to get to part II sooner, but there’s been this huge oil spew in the gulf and besides, part II is related to part I – only it may be worse.

At the end of March – three weeks before the Deepwater Horizon disaster – Barack Obama told us he wants to expand offshore oil drilling and said with the new rigs oil spills were almost impossible. We know he was as wrong as he could be. Mr. Obama didn’t mean to lie, it’s just that he relied on the idiots of the oil industry for his talking points. (Is “idiots” too harsh? Think Tony Hayward. No, it’s not too harsh.)

At the same time he’s plumping for more offshore drilling, Mr. Obama wants to build more nuclear plants. Guess where he’s getting his information on nukes? Like the oil industry, the nuclear industry is in charge of Mr. Obama’s talking points and they too are idiots who use the president as a ventriloquist’s dummy to lie to the American people.

When the current generation of nuclear power plants began to reach the end of their lifespans, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) began to take them off line. The nuclear industry responded with a lobby campaign, the NRC regulations were altered and now other members of that same generation of nukes – now nearing 40 years old – are being granted 20-year extensions to their operating permits. Sound familiar?
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By floegel | Posted in Commentary, Nuclear Energy | Tagged , , , | Comments (0)
06/24/2010

The Muse

I found Clio in her cave, high above the Aegean Sea. She looked up from the scroll she was writing when I entered; dozens of other scrolls lay half-unrolled, perched on rocks or unwinding across the floor.

“The technology, of course is unprecedented,” she said, knowing already what subject I’d come to discuss, “The other aspects, well…” She gestured toward the piles of parchment. “I’ve seen it all before.”

Clearly, she was happy to have company. “I have so few visitors anymore. I thought Mr. Santayana’s comment would help, but it was about then that things really started to get quiet. The Romans used to come all the time. This place was practically empty in those days. Now my dad has to double the size of the cave every 18 months and I still can’t keep up.”

“But I’m sorry, you came to ask about the oil spill,” Clio said.

“The president has appointed a commission to study what went wrong,” I said. She smiled and pointed to a heap of scrolls. “Those are the commission reports I haven’t gotten around to filing yet.”
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By floegel | Posted in Commentary, Oceans, Oil | Tagged , , , | Comments (0)
06/17/2010

Out of Commission

On May 20, Lee Hamilton and Thomas Kean, leaders of the 9-11 Commission, told a congressional committee that six years after the commission completed its work, the federal government has not taken the steps needed to implement the commission’s recommendations.

The next day, President Barack Obama announced the formation of a commission to investigate the Deepwater Horizon blowout oil disaster and the safety of offshore drilling. He appointed former Florida Senator Bob Graham (D) and former EPA Administrator William Reilly to head the panel.

Flash forward ten years. It’s 2020. Will Sen. Graham and Mr. Reilly be sitting before a congressional committee, testifying that, six years after their commission completed its work, the federal government still has not acted on the key recommendations of its report? The more immediate concern is: Will the commission even make the right recommendations about America’s energy future?

“Blue ribbon” commissions are not the only things 9-11 and the BP disaster have in common. The 9-11 attacks were indirectly – but profoundly – about oil and America’s energy policy, or lack of one.
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By floegel | Posted in Commentary, Oceans, Oil, September 11th | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments (0)
06/10/2010

“We’re Gonna Need Bigger Boat”

My neighbors are starting to refer to our block as “The Farm” because of all the fruit trees and vegetables that grow in our gardens. We have bees and chickens and the guys across the street make beer with hops that grow along our fences.

Margaret is our master gardener, dispensing advice. Last week she helped me prune a young plum tree so it will crown out and have sturdy limbs to support heavy crops of fruit in years to come. She lectured as she cut, telling me that by being selective, the tree would react in certain ways and side growth would be privileged over upward growth.

The world “privilege” stuck in my head. Here we were, Margaret and I, blithely interfering in nature with our bypass shears. The idea was to take certain actions in hope of obtaining particular outcomes.

We all do it, all the time. We choose one thing over another and we change the course of our personal history. Or we refuse to choose and our history is written for us, but it is written whatever we do or fail to do.
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By floegel | Posted in Commentary, Oceans, Oil | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (0)