CELL Blog

decaying pipelines threaten to add 20 percent to energy prices in the next decade

``We'll look back on this event as the Pearl Harbor Day in energy,'' said Matthew Simmons, chairman of energy investment bank Simmons & Co. International in Houston. The chance that the leaks and corrosion found at Prudhoe Bay by BP, Europe's second- largest oil company, are an isolated occurrence is ``zero,'' said Simmons, who's writing a book on aging oil infrastructure.

A growing minority of analysts, oil executives and government officials say the current system for producing and transporting crude will be unable to deliver the energy needed in the next 10 years. Repairs and replacement of pipes, valves and refineries will help push oil to $93 a barrel by 2015, from around $70 today, says Barclays Capital analyst Kevin Norrish in London, the most accurate price forecaster in a survey by Bloomberg News last year.

Pedal Power

The efficiency and variable speed of the output are two features that can be exploited. Since it requires no fuel, and is not affected by time-of-day or weather, it would make an excellent Human-powered emergency generator, ready for any blackout.

This teacher in Australia is using the pedal-power device to live for two weeks "in a self-contained underwater ecological habitat, surviving on the oxygen that plants give out."

This four-part story in the Chicago Tribune describes the Peak Oil crisis as it relates to the average American consumer.

To truly grasp the scope of the crisis looming before them, Americans must retrace their seemingly ordinary tankful of gasoline back to its shadowy sources. This is, in effect, a journey into the heart of America's vast and troubled oil dependency. And what it exposes is a globe-spanning energy network that today is so fragile, so beholden to hostile powers and so clearly unsustainable, that our car-centered lifestyle seems more at risk than ever.

"How will you live in a world without cheap oil?" is a good overview of Peak Oil from MoneyWeek, an international financial website.

Will We Hit $100?

There is an increasingly strong case, perhaps even an emerging consensus, that we are heading for a new price reality — one that until now has been the province of oil-conspiracy crackpots and environmental end-of-timers. This is the world of $100 oil.

Quarter of Species Gone by 2050

"Climate change is rapidly becoming the most serious threats to the planet's biodiversity," said Jay Malcolm, an assistant forestry professor at the University of Toronto. "This study provides even stronger scientific evidence that global warming will result in catastrophic species loss across the planet."

Polar bears sink deeper into danger

Some climate models predict that summer sea ice in the Arctic could disappear by the end of this century. And if that happens, conservationists fear that the polar bears, which currently number between 22,000 and 25,000, could die out entirely.

Stranded Walrus Pups Cry for Help

"If walruses and other ice-associated marine mammals cannot adapt to caring for their young in shallow waters without sea-ice available as a resting platform between dives to the sea floor, a significant population decline of this species could occur," the research team wrote in the April issue of the journal Aquatic Mammals.

Just got back from a trip to the Lost Coast.
A local informed us that within the past ten years, he has witnessed a sharp rise in temperatures in that area.
Climate Change will have varying effects across the planet, but it seems that many (if not most) places will be getting much more hot than they are currently.

The Paradigm Is The Enemy:
A Speech by Michael C. Ruppert { author of Crossing the Rubicon }
for the Local Solutions to the Energy Dilemma Conference
April 27-29, 2006 New York City, at Cooper Union

If the global economic paradigm that we live under dictates infinite growth, then we must disengage individually and by community from that paradigm.
If the activist paradigm that we live under says that we must slow down the process of reform and planning to make room for all and offend no one, no matter how much they may slow down or confuse the process, then we must disengage from that paradigm.