Category Archives: water pollution

I Just Had An Unexpected Experience With An Astro Turf Group

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You won’t believe this, what with Google’s image as Mr. Clean and Green. BUT when you type in the simple phrase “household energy usage” into their search engine, the first hit you get is Energy Citizen. This is the astroturf  nonprofit front group sponsored by the Koch Brothers, Don Blankenship and Peabody Coal that wants the Federal Government out of the mining business. They want safety laws repealed and they detest global warming and Cap and Trade policies. Massey Energy is up for sale by the way so Blankenship may not be able to play with the big boys much longer…Ahhh poor baby.

http://energycitizens.org/jobs-red/default.aspx?utm_campaign=Q4_2010&utm_source=EyeTraffic&utm_medium=SEM&utm_content=ENERGY&utm_term=Domestic-Energy&gclid=CIWdkNbLt6UCFcms7QodoA00Gw

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Not only that but they land you write on the “To Join” page without even a chance to be repelled. How repelling is that?

Help Keep Our Recovery Going … Join Energy Citizens.

Businesses can thrive and create new jobs when energy is affordable and available. But when lawmakers hinder energy development, we all lose.

We need YOU to help Washington hear our message: American families and communities need sensible energy policies that power our economy and create jobs. Become part of our movement today — join Energy Citizens and let Congress hear your concerns about American energy and American jobs.

We need solutions that increase access to all reliable domestic energy: wind, solar, nuclear, and — yes — oil and natural gas. Our nation has ample energy reserves that can contribute to our economy for decades to come.

The tragedy in the Gulf of Mexico underscores the risks involved in energy development — and the need for improved safety. But this tragedy should not make us forget that our economy and way of life depend on affordable energy. We must not allow opponents to use the tragedy to stop domestic oil and natural gas development. Even with increased conservation, our nation’s energy needs are growing.

You can make a difference by joining our citizens’ movement for sensible energy policies. Help us win a national energy plan that creates jobs, promotes economic growth, and increases our security. Please join us TODAY — and tell Congress where you stand

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Instead of here, where at least you can reject the party line if you want to.

http://energycitizens.org/ec/advocacy/default.aspx

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Google should be ashamed of themselves. More tomorrow.

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The Atlantic And Christian Science Monitor Both Run Major Energy Articles

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First up the Christian Science Monitor.

http://www.csmonitor.com/Environment/2010/1108/New-energy-climate-change-and-sustainability-shape-a-new-era

New energy: climate change and sustainability shape a new era

A new energy revolution – similar to shifts from wood to coal to oil – is inevitable as climate change and oil scarcity drive a global search for sustainability in power production. But even the promise of renewable energy holds drawbacks.

New energy: climate change and sustainability will shape a new era in which renewable sources such as solar power will ultimately replace oil. A solarplant near Seville, Spain uses mirrors to concentrate the sun’s rays onto towers where they produce steam to drive a turbine, producing electricity.

Marcelo del Poso/Reuters

“Tonight I want to have an unpleasant talk with you,” a somber President Jimmy Carter said gravely into a television camera on an April night in 1977.


A series of oil embargoes and OPEC price hikes had hit the nation hard. Gasoline prices had tripled. Auto-dependent Americans had sometimes waited hours in line to buy the gasoline needed to get to work. The president, in an iconic fireside chat – in a beige cardigan – two months earlier had congenially urged Americans to turn thermostats down to 65 degrees F. by day, 55 by night.

But on this night, he ratcheted up his tone: Warning of an imminent “national catastrophe” and scolding Americans for selfish wastefulness, the president declared it time for Americans to curb consumption of oil, which he said had doubled in the 1950s and again in the ’60s – time to end their dependence on imports.

“This difficult effort will be the moral equivalent of war,” he said.

Mr. Carter created the Department of Energy. He called for energy conservation and increased production of coal and solar power. He installed solar panels on the White House.

But his vision – to push America and the world into a new energy era as significant as the shift from wood to coal that fueled the Industrial Revolution – never materialized.

Gasoline prices plummeted in the 1980s, removing the incentive to end oil imports. Driving returned to precrisis levels. Carter’s successor, Ronald Reagan, withdrew funding for renewable energies. And the White House solar panels were torn down.

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More tomorrow.

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Anyone Who Does Not Compost Is Part Of The Problem

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No one and I repeat NO ONE should be throwing out food. Everyone can compost. If you can’t use the resulting dirt (everyone should have house plants if they value their health) then you can just throw it outside. It doesn’t matter if you live in an apartment in a urban center or a house in the country, the message is stop throwing food in the garbage. The problem starts at the store though. Please stop overbuying food…especially meat.

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http://articles.latimes.com/2010/nov/07/opinion/la-oe-bloom-food-waste-20101107

Help the planet: Stop wasting food

Producing it and then getting rid of leftovers require a lot of fossil fuel. Just taking a few simple steps can ease the problem.

Op-Ed

November 07, 2010|By Jonathan Bloom

Let me guess: You’re concerned about the environment. You recycle, buy the right light bulbs, drink from a reusable water bottle (preferably one made of metal) and wish you could afford a hybrid. You try to remember your reusable shopping bags when you go to the market and feel guilty when you don’t.

But there’s something you could be doing that would make a much bigger difference, and it’s not one of those really hard things like carpooling to work or installing solar panels on your roof.

All you need to do is minimize your food waste. If you buy it and bring it home, eat it. That alone is one of the easiest ways to aid the environment.

About 40% of the food produced in the United States isn’t consumed. Every day Americans waste enough food to fill the Rose Bowl. And our national food waste habit is on the upswing: We waste 50% more food today than we did in 1974.

Squandering so much of what we grow doesn’t just waste food; it also wastes the fossil fuel that went into growing, processing, transporting and refrigerating it. A recent study estimated conservatively that 2% of all U.S. energy consumption went to producing food that was never eaten. To give you a sense of perspective, every year, through uneaten food, we waste 70 times the amount of oil that gushed into the Gulf of Mexico during the three months of the Deepwater Horizon spill.

That waste of resources continues after we throw away food. There is the energy required to haul the discarded food to the landfill. And once there, food decomposes and creates methane, a greenhouse gas 23 times more potent a heat trapper than carbon dioxide. Landfills are the second-largest human-related source of methane emissions, and rotting food causes the majority of methane there. It’s climate change coming directly from your kitchen.

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America should be ashamed. More tomorrow.

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The Earth Is 50% Over Its Human Capacity – We have tapped our planet out

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This is the start of part 3 of a 3 part essay on overpopulation and the finite resources that exist on this planet. The only one we have. Science fiction is nonsense. The Mars Mission is never going to happen because we have not solved the fundamental issues. Cosmic radiation is powerful and lethal. We have never found a way to block it. It causes cancer while you are on this planet where we are generally protected by 150,000 ft. of atmosphere, an ozone layer and a powerful magnetic field. Until we can duplicate that we ain’t going nowhere. Then there is the issue of speed. After Mars and Venus, even going full throttle (what ever that is) there is nothing near to us that wouldn’t require years of travel to get to.

So the ramifications of this multipart essay are important. It does come from a Peak Oil perspective so it has all the doom and gloom, survivalist type trademarks, but if you put that aside it is still important.

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http://www.swans.com/library/art16/ga290.html

The Economy Is Not Coming Back
Part III: The Reasons it Shouldn’t

by Gilles d’Aymery

Fundraising Drive: If rants appeal to you, dear readers, then turn your attention to MSNBC, Fox News, Antiwar.com, other news aggregators, and the myriad noisy outputs that emphasize either the status quo or some reactionary future. If not, and you wish to keep thinking about real matters like, say, working to change the socioeconomic system, and you consider that culture is an intrisic component of society, then Swans is directed to you. If a few original thoughts (and original work not found anywhere else) are your call, then Swans is for you. Understand the difference. Whether a donation of $5, $75, or $100, they all are welcome, but again — if our approach is worthy of your interest — you need to up the ante. $180 in the past cycle were much appreciated. Still it won’t be enough to keep Swans going in its current form. Please, friends and comrades, help us. We need another $1,700+ to keep providing you with real content. Do Donate now!

Many thanks to Brandon Haleamau, Dimitri Oram, and Philip Fornaci for their generous contributions.

Read the first part of this essay, “A Short History of the Maelstrom.”
Read the second part of this essay, “The Reasons it Won’t [come back].”

“This meeting is part of the world’s efforts to address a very simple fact — we are destroying life on Earth.”

—Achim Steiner, head of the U.N. Environment Program, Nagoya, Japan, October 18, 2010

“We are nearing a tipping point, or the point of no return for biodiversity loss. Unless proactive steps are taken for biodiversity, there is a risk that we will surpass that point in the next 10 years.”

—Ryu Matsumoto, Japanese Environment Minister, Nagoya, Japan, October 18, 2010 (1)

(Swans – November 15, 2010) The first part of this long essay presented an abridged history of the road to the current deep socioeconomic crisis that some observers had predicted, even though no one could pinpoint the exact timing of the implosion. The second part submitted that there are objective factors that explain why the economy is not going “to come back” any time soon. But, more importantly, profound and intensifying environmental and ecological crises militate in favor of not having the economy revert to the shape and form it had. Some of these crises are the object of this third part. In short, to return to business as usual will lead to collective suicide, which Mother Nature will trigger in the not so distant future.

According to the WWF (2) 2010 Living Planet Report, “human demand outstrips nature’s supply.” “In 2007,” the report states, “humanity’s Footprint exceeded the Earth’s biocapacity by 50%.” The Global Footprint Network (GFN) has calculated that on August 21, 2010, the world reached Earth Overshoot Day — that is, “the day of the year in which human demand on the biosphere exceeds what it can regenerate.” As GFN president Mathis Wackernagel stated: “If you spent your entire annual income in nine months, you would probably be extremely concerned. The situation is no less dire when it comes to our ecological budget. Climate change, biodiversity loss, deforestation, water and food shortages are all clear signs: We can no longer finance our consumption on credit. Nature is foreclosing.” Though these environmental organizations are promoting policies that are essentially based on demographic and increasingly economic Malthusianism — independent researcher Michael Barker has written in-depth analyses, particularly in regard to the WWF, in these pages (3) — they do acknowledge the gravity of the situation. As the WWF report states, “An overshoot of 50% means it would take 1.5 years for the Earth to regenerate the renewable resources that people used in 2007 and absorb CO2 waste. … CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions from human activities are far more than ecosystems can absorb.” In other words, the world, or to be more precise, some parts of the world, over-produces and over-consumes natural resources that are being depleted at an exponential rate. That’s the main reason for not having US (and other rich nations’) households “spend again at pre-crisis levels.” (4) The socioeconomic paradigm built on capital accumulation, perpetual material growth, and financial profits for the infinitesimal few must be not just overhauled but buried, and replaced by an equitable new arrangement that takes into account all natural ecosystems.

Fossil fuels

Fossil fuels have been feeding the materialistic economic paradigm, whether under capitalism or socialism, since the early 1800s. Their use increased moderately between 1850 and 1950, thereafter shooting up like a rocket. (5)

According to the US Energy Information Administration, “in 2007 primary sources of energy consisted of petroleum 36.0%, coal 27.4%, natural gas 23.0%, amounting to an 86.4% share for fossil fuels in primary energy consumption in the world.” Today, worldwide transportation depends on oil for 90 percent of its needs. There is not one sector of the economy that is independent of fossil fuels. From 1990 to 2008 the global consumption of fossil fuels has increased as follows: oil: 25 percent, with a stabilization since the beginning of the economic crisis; coal: 48 percent; and natural gas: 54 percent. (6)

With these few facts in mind, where does the world stand in regard to fossil fuels?

Petroleum

Since the beginning of the current latent depression, as oil consumption has flattened or slightly decreased, the topic of peak oil has by and large disappeared in the mainstream media. Were it not for the Blogosphere (7) that keeps bringing facts of oil depletion to the fore, one would believe that everything is fine and dandy — and, anyway, the alarmists are deemed radicals (right or left) and as such are discounted. However, what to make of Charles Maxwell, a senior energy analyst at Weeden & Co. — certainly not a “radical” — who has written and talked extensively about The Gathering Storm? (8)

Or what about Robert Hirsch? Swans readers may recall Hirsch’s 2005 report “Peaking of World Oil Production: Impacts, Mitigation, and Risk Management” that was highlighted on January 29, 2007, in the dossier, “Energy Resources And Our Future,” by Admiral Hyman G. Rickover. In that report, Hirsch, an oilman par excellence, showed the dire challenges the world faces and how to possibly mitigate them. What happened to that report is best explained by Hirsch himself, which he did in a potent interview (in English) with the French Le Monde on September 16, 2010 (the report was shelved by both the Bush and Obama administrations).

Still, Hirsch remains adamant. In The Impending World Energy Mess, co-authored with Roger Bezdek and Robert Wendling (Apogee Prime, October 2010), Hirsch makes the case that oil production is on the decline; that no quick fixes are available; and that societal priorities will have to change drastically.

The research done by the British Chatham House, the UK Industry Taskforce on Peak Oil & Energy Security, the German military analysis, and other US military reports, like the “2010 Joint Operating Environment” (pdf) shows that oil-consuming countries are bracing themselves for the decline of oil and the risks of conflicts it will engender. But for a few scientists supported and financed by energy conglomerates and pro-growth lobbies, the scientific community has by and large reached the conclusion that the decline of oil was not reversible — a conclusion reached as early as 1998 by the Paris-based International Energy Agency though this crucial information was left out of its annual World Energy Outlook report under pressure from powerful players. (9) Keep in mind that peak oil does not mean the end of oil, as some doomsayers claim. It denotes the end of cheap oil on the one hand and on the other the physical (and economic) inability to find new reserves proportionately to the oil being consumed.

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Reading the whole 3 parts at one sitting can cross your eyes. I put up the parts that got me going as an energy guy. You can read the rest on your own at the site. Also the organization is asking for donations…I am not a regular reader of their stuff so whether they are worthy or not is up to you to decide.

More tomorrow.

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Cap And Trade Rises From The Ashes – It made it into the Senate

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It’s Jam Band Friday – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJ16hEpB_Sk

Conventional post election wisdom has the Cap and Trade legislation being declared dead. But, it is sitting in a Senate that the Democrats control. Will they bust it lose during the end of the year session. Who knows, but I think the issue will not go away so sooner or later something will have to be done. I mean Russia caught on fire. How much more does it take than that.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/nov/4/clean-coal-is-as-dead-as-cap-and-trade/

MILLOY: Clean coal is as dead as ‘cap-and-trade’

Mitch McConnell had better study up on the election results

By Steve Milloy-The Washington Times

While we shouldn’t expect our left-wing elitist president to understand Tuesday’s electoral rejection of his “progressive” prescriptions for America, we should expect Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, Kentucky Republican, to get it.

But Mr. McConnell seems to have missed the message, at least when it comes to “cap-and-trade” – odd for a coal-state politician. The day after the election, Mr. McConnell said, “The president says he’s for nuclear power. Most of my members are for nuclear power. The president says he’s for clean coal technology. Most of my members are for clean coal technology. There are areas that we can make progress on for the country.”

Aside from the canard of President Obama sincerely supporting nuclear power and the fact that Republicans ought to avoid the loaded and already co-opted-by-the-left word “progress,” so-called “clean coal” is a form of Obama-think – a discredited cap-and-trade concept that was more trap than sincere policy.

Some in the coal industry and some coal-burning electric utilities had been talked into supporting cap-and-trade, provided that taxpayers and ratepayers forked over billions (if not trillions) of dollars for so-called “carbon capture and sequestration” (CCS) – that is, burying utility carbon-dioxide emissions deep underground and hoping they stay there safely.

But to the extent that any so-called environmentalists paid any lip service to clean coal and CCS, it was only to lure coal and utility suckers into cap-and-trade. Does anyone really believe, after all, that the greens would allow utilities to inject underground billions of tons of highly pressurized carbon dioxide all over the nation? They fought tooth-and-nail, after all, to prevent the storage of sealed casks of spent nuclear fuel one mile underground in the Nevada desert.

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vm-pFqdqcZY&feature=related

Which would they prefer, a tax on carbon? This guys lists all the reasons for cap and trade mechanisms to be set up by the Federal Government and heavily policed by the Federal Government. Nonetheless he likes carbon taxes because they supply more stability. But his belief that it won’t be passed on to the customer is asinine.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RSJdjb6K5i4&feature=fvw

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http://www.greenchipstocks.com/articles/cap-and-trade-legislation/810

Cap and Trade Legislation is Fatally Flawed

My First Ever Mea Culpa

By Nick Hodge
Tuesday, April 13th, 2010

We may never see cap and trade in this country.

Those are words I never thought I’d write.

In fact, I’ve been touting the benefits of a cap and trade market since 2007. But new ideas, unraveling facts, and recent events have changed my thinking.

So today, I’m publishing my first ever mea culpa.

Cap and Trade Legislation is Fatally Flawed

My First Ever Mea Culpa

By Nick Hodge
Tuesday, April 13th, 2010

We may never see cap and trade in this country.

Those are words I never thought I’d write.

In fact, I’ve been touting the benefits of a cap and trade market since 2007. But new ideas, unraveling facts, and recent events have changed my thinking.

So today, I’m publishing my first ever mea culpa.

Carbon Should Still be Priced

To be clear, I’m not saying that carbon shouldn’t have a price. By all means, it should.

What I’m saying is that cap and trade isn’t the way to implement it.

At the end of the day, carbon dioxide is a harmful waste product that needs to be handled. Companies don’t get free passes for treating and disposing of other waste streams their businesses generate. Why should carbon be any different?

Not charging companies for emitting carbon is giving them free reign over something they cannot and will not ever own: the atmosphere.

We don’t let companies freely dump waste into rivers or lakes… We don’t allow companies to dump waste in forests… So why, then, are we still letting companies dump a known pollutant into the atmosphere unchecked?

This is why everyone speaks of how cheap coal is. It’s not really that cheap, we just don’t include the price of carbon in its costs.

Carbon isn’t a business externality — meaning, companies that produce it can shift the cost to society — and it can no longer be treated as such.

The Trouble with Cap and Trade

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You can go to the article for the rest. I personally support a carbon tax. But I have always said that Cap and Trade is what we get because high finance wants it that way. More Monday.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wdAhR-c–20&feature=related

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India To Burn More Hydrocarbons – That should clear the air

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http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20101101/sc_afp/indiaenergyoilpolitics

India predicts 40% leap in demand for fossil fuels

by Penny MacRae Penny Macrae – Mon Nov 1, 7:12 am ET

NEW DELHI (AFP) – Premier Manmohan Singh told India’s energy firms on Monday to scour the globe for fuel supplies as he warned the country’s demand for fossil fuels is set to soar 40 percent over the next decade.

The country of more than 1.1 billion people already imports nearly 80 percent of its crude oil to fuel an economy that is expected to grow 8.5 percent this year and at least nine percent next year.

Demand for hydrocarbons — petroleum, coal, natural gas — “over the next 10 years will increase by over 40 percent,” Singh told an energy conference in New Delhi.

“India needs adequate supplies of energy at affordable prices to meet the demand of its rapidly growing economy,” he said, as rising Indian incomes spur industrial demand and more people buy energy-guzzling cars and appliances.

Singh’s call comes as India is locked in a race with emerging market rival China for fuel supplies to feed their booming economies in which analysts say Beijing has taken a strong lead.

India faces “immense competition from China which has been far quicker to react when an asset becomes available,” Kalpana Jain, senior director of global consultancy Deloitte, told AFP.

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More tomorrow

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Drill Baby Drill – ANWR yields dry holes

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I said all along that the idea that there were huge new oil fields in Alaska was both dangerous and wrong. Dangerous, because if there was oil there, drilling could destroy the ecosphere. Wrong, because like the North Sea, the oil companies always claim there is “oil next door” and then drill dry holes. I have often thought they use this technique to drain capital from smaller investors.

http://www.cnn.com/2010/US/10/27/alaska.oil.reserves/index.html

Alaska’s untapped oil reserves estimate lowered by about 90 percent

By the CNN Wire Staff
October 27, 2010 1:35 a.m. EDT

(CNN) — The U.S. Geological Survey says a revised estimate for the amount of conventional, undiscovered oil in the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska is a fraction of a previous estimate.

The group estimates about 896 million barrels of such oil are in the reserve, about 90 percent less than a 2002 estimate of 10.6 billion barrels.

The new estimate is mainly due to the incorporation of new data from recent exploration drilling revealing gas occurrence rather than oil in much of the area, the geological survey said.

“These new findings underscore the challenge of predicting whether oil or gas will be found in frontier areas,” USGS Director Dr. Marcia McNutt said in a statement. “It is important to re-evaluate the petroleum potential of an area as new data becomes available.”

The organization also estimates 8 trillion cubic feet less gas than a 2002 estimate of 61 trillion cubic feet of undiscovered, conventional, non-associated gas — meaning gas found in discrete accumulations with little to no crude oil in the reservoir.

“Recent activity in the NPRA, including 3-D seismic surveys, federal lease sales administered by the Bureau of Land Management and drilling of more than 30 exploration wells in the area provides geological information that is more indicative of gas than oil,” the geological survey said.

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Of course the nutcases still believe this and will until their dieing days.

http://www.pushhamburger.com/hidden.htm

Huge Alaska Oil Reserves Go Unused

After 30 years, an insider finally acknowledges the United States
has all the oil and gas it needs.

By Marie Gunther

The United States has more oil reserves than Saudi Arabia but this happy though shocking information has been covered up for years.

The wells have been drilled, it’s merely a matter of turning on the faucets to supply America’s needs for 200 years.

These astounding revelations have been confirmed by a 30-year veteran oil exe cutive with leukemia who has decided to speak out.

In 1980, Lindsey Williams wrote a book, The Energy Non-Crisis, based upon his eye witness accounts during the construction of the Trans-Alaska pipeline. As a chaplain assigned to executive status and the advisory board of Atlantic Richfield & Co. (ARCO), he was privy to detailed information.

“All of our energy problems could have been solved in the ’70s with the huge discovery of oil under Gull Island, Prudhoe Bay, Alaska,” Williams said. “There is more pure grade oil there than in all of Sau di Arabia. Gull Island contains as much oil and natural gas as Americans could use in 200 years.”

Oddly though, immediately after this massive discovery, the federal government ordered the rigs to be capped and oil production shut down.

Developing Alaskan oil would make the United States completely independent of oil imports, Williams said in his book.

Why is the government covering up such good news? Why does it want to be dependent on imported oil? Do international financiers who are heavily invested in the oil industry want to keep the supply limited and prices up?

Will the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, chaired by Sen. Frank Murkowski (R-Alaska), investigate what could be a criminal cover-up? Will the appropriate House committees in quire? Or the Justice Department? Since the cover-up has extended through four presidential administrations, only public outrage can force action.

“Everything you hear on the evening news and out of Washington is garbage,” said Jim Lawler, an oil production manager with ARCO. “Eight wells have already been drilled in the areas environmentalists are claiming we must not go in. We have already been in and out. There was no damage done. All we need to do is start production.”

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More tomorrow

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Global Resource Depletion OR Recycling A Waste Of Time – Which is it

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shhh It’s Jam Band Friday – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hntXAO_Rq7c

OK so which is it, are we running out of stuff or not? Is 6 Billion people too many or not? Have we cut down way too may trees or not? I believe these answers are knowable. Are the Ocean’s fished out or not?  Is Global Warming happening? The issue seems to be Price. If Global Warming were happening then carbon would be expensive. But what if price isn’t the issue when capitalists and nations treat resources as if they were “free”.

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http://www.planetthoughts.org/?pg=pt/Whole&qid=3267

Blog item: Recycling? What A Waste.

By Jim Fedako

This fall, school kids across the country will again be taught a chief doctrine in the civic religion: recycle, not only because you fear the police but also because you love the planet. They come home well prepared to be the enforcers of the creed against parents who might inadvertently drop a foil ball into the glass bin or overlook a plastic wrapper in the aluminum bin.

Oh, I used to believe in recycling, and I still believe in the other two R’s: reducing and reusing. However, recycling is a waste of time, money, and ever-scarce resources. What John Tierney wrote in the New York Times nearly 10 years ago is still true: “Recycling may be the most wasteful activity in modern America.”

Reducing and reusing make sense. With no investment in resources, I can place the plastic grocery bag in the bathroom garbage can and save a penny or so for some more-pressing need. Reducing and reusing are free market activities that are profitable investments of time and labor.

Any astute entrepreneur will see the benefit of conserving factors of production. Today, builders construct houses using less wood than similar houses built just 20 years ago. In addition, these houses are built sturdier; for the most part anyway.

The Green’s love for trees did not reduce the amount of wood used in construction; the reduction was simply a reaction to the increasing cost for wood products. Using less wood makes financial sense, and any entrepreneur worth his profit will change his recipe to conserve wood through better design or by substituting less dear materials for wood products.

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pojL_35QlSI&feature=related

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http://www.energybulletin.net/stories/2010-10-20/global-resource-depletion

Published Oct 20 2010 by The Oil Drum: Europe, Archived Oct 20 2010

Global resource depletion

by Ugo Bardi

André Diederen’s recent book on resource depletion

I have been thinking, sometimes, that I could reserve a shelf of my library for those books which have that elusive quality that I could call “modern wisdom”. Books that go beyond the buzz of the media news, the shallowness of politicians’ speech, the hyper-specialization of technical texts. That shelf would contain, first of all, “The Limits to Growth” by Meadows and others; then the books by Jared Diamond, James Lovelock, Konrad Lorenz, Richard Dawkins, Peter Ward and several others that have affected the way I see the world.

I think I’ll never set up such a shelf, I have too many books and too few shelves; many are packed full with three rows of books. But, if I ever were to put these books together, I think that the recent book by André Diederen “Global Resource Depletion” would make a nice addition to the lot.

The subject of resource depletion, of course, is well known to readers of “The Oil Drum”. So well known that it is difficult to think of a book that says something new. Diederen, indeed, succeeds in the task not so much in reason of the details on the availability of mineral commodities that he provides, but for the innovative way he describes our relation to the subject. In other words, Diederen’s book is not a boring list of data; it is a lively discussion on how to deal with the implications of these data. It is a book on the future and how we can prepare for it.

To give you some idea of the flavor of the book, just a quote:

(p. 43) “… it isn’t enough to have large absolute quantities (“the Earth’s crust is so big”) and to have all the technology in place. (p. 33) … we have plenty of water in the Mediterranean or Atlantic Ocean and we have ample proven technologies to desalinate and pipe the water to the desert, so, why isn’t the Sahara desert green yet?”

This is, of course, the crucial point of resource depletion: what counts is cost, not amounts (I plan to use this example in my next talk!). Diederen is an unconventional thinker and he goes deeply into matters that, in some circles would be thought to be unspeakable; for instance (p. 41)

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Price? Really. More next week.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3a9mx1IVZzU&feature=related

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Hungarian Responsible For Toxic Spill – Doesn’t think he is

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It’s Jam band Friday – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k1bxlDAjGCo

This appears to say it all:

http://www.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/europe/10/15/hungary.sludge.ceo/

CEO doesn’t ‘feel’ responsible in Hungary spill, but will aid efforts

By the CNN Wires Staff
October 15, 2010 10:55 a.m. EDT

(CNN) — The CEO of the Hungarian company behind a huge toxic spill on Thursday said he doesn’t know whether he’s responsible for the disaster, but added, “I have moral duties and I will fulfill them.”

Zoltan Bakonyi, the chief executive of the MAL aluminum plant, spoke with CNN’s Diana Magnay a day after he was released from jail pending trial. Bakonyi was detained on Monday, accused of public endangerment and harming the environment.

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“It’s said I should be responsible although I don’t feel it,” Bakonyi told Magnay. He insisted that MAL was in compliance with all Hungarian safety regulations and pointed out that he has only been CEO for two years. Bakonyi argued that the problems presented by the reservoir and the accumulation of toxin in it stretched back 25 years or more.

But he added that it is his “moral duty” is to “help” and put his energies “120-percent into the aid effort.”

Bakonyi categorically denied that a hole was present in the reservoir in the days or weeks before the spill happened. Bakonyi said he had visited the reservoir in the weeks before the spill happened. But, he said he hadn’t seen the photo released by the The World Wildlife Fund showing one of the pools of sludge — a byproduct of the process to turn bauxite ore into aluminium oxide — leaking into a nearby field. The WWF says the photo was taken in June.

Bakonyi also denied the spill was a consequence of overproduction or improper payment of workers. He maintained that there was no way to anticipate the accident. “The only way anyone could have imagine this happening,” he said, “was in a terrorist attack.”

MAL has “an idea” about how the spill occurred, but Bakonyi won’t comment on what it is. He says no statement on causes will be released until Hungarian authorities complete their own investigation.

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He may have an idea??? More next week.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kkWGwY5nq7A&feature=related

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