Bob Morris @ Sep 19th 2007 08:31 - Category: Anti-war ;
Lefti on the News recorded speeches from the Sept. 15 March on Washington and posted them on YouTube. They were recorded from the C-SPAN2 rebroadcast and thus are top quality.
Big thanks to Eli for performing this valuable service and linking to them from one post on his blog. Link.
Bob Morris @ Sep 19th 2007 07:19 - Category: Unfiled ;
Bob Morris @ Sep 19th 2007 00:18 - Category: Peak oil ;
The Oil Drum reports on the Association for the Study of Peak Oil conference.
As Dr. James Schlesinger, the first Secretary of Energy [under Carter], said in his Opening Address, the battle is over, Peak Oil is now accepted as inevitable, and the debate only becomes as to when. We have “won” and need to learn to take Yes! as an answer.
His address had three themes; 1)Â Recognition of the Peak is growing and the prophets are no longer howling in the wilderness, 2)Â Don’t rub it in, be gracious in victory else risk alienating recent converts, 3) Patience. Gas-powered automotive transport needs to be replaced, but we don’t know by what yet.
From the belly of the beast comes another convert. Lord Oxburgh, former chair of Shell, has warned that oil prices could hit $150 per barrel and accused the industry of having its “head in the sand” and “sleepwalking into a problem which is actually going to be very serious”
He said it hardly mattered when peak oil production occurred because the real problem is the gap between production and demand.
Bob Morris @ Sep 19th 2007 00:07 - Category: Unfiled ;
I’m half-way though [Fred] Pearce’s “With Speed and Violence“, and he just talked about the effect of aerosols on climate. There’s a growing concern among climatologists that the role of aerosols in mitigating temperature rise has been underestimated.What that means is that if fine particulate matter (like soot) was removed from the air, the true warming potential of the existing CO2 would be revealed.This means that one of the unintended consequences of a complete replacement of coal with nuclear power, as its advocates insist upon, would be to eliminate the particulates that are currently shielding us from the consequences of our foolishness, and expose us to the full warming fury of the CO2 that is already in the atmosphere and will be there for another century. We’d get a global temperature rise of a couple of degrees as a consequence.
How’s that for being caught on the horns of a dilemma? Oh, by the way, the same principle applies to wind turbines and solar panels, but nuclear power is more dangerous in this regard because it might actually succeed in displacing some coal consumption.
Hmm, except isn’t coal responsible for much of the c02 being there in the first place?
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