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Extreme Veteran
Posts: 319
| George Mobiot has decided that since we have enough oil to fry us we should stop talking about it and just talk about climate change.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/jul/02/peak-oil-we-we-...
This article fails to recognise that a peak in conventional oil has happened and we are now going for more environmentally damaging sources such as tar sands as these have now become economically viable exactly as predicted.
See Richard Heinburg's article
http://www.energybulletin.net/stories/2012-07-02/peak-denial
and also http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2012/jul/05/extracting-truth-pea...
From experience of running the Keep the Heat in Campaign last year (https://docs.google.com/file/d/0Bx1pgJt2UogBT0hhd2JBdlNqNWc/edit?pli=1) I would also say that generally people do not seem particularly motivated to do something about climate change whereas if they realise that they can save money by becoming more energy efficient and realise that on current price trends (10% average increase in electricity a year in recent years) they will go bust if they don't, it focuses the mind.
It looks like the oil lobby realised that they might not make so much money if people actually reduced their demand so on top of funding climate skeptics they are now also funding peak deniers. Shame George has jumped on the bandwaggon. |
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Regular
Posts: 80
| To be fair to Mr Monbiot i think it's a problem that alot of the "Old time" Enviormentalists a nd "Greens" have, as mentioned in Richard Heinburg's article. That they are stuck with and evironmentists mind set or bubble. They still see the Climate as something that stands alone and that somehow if we just all stopped using Fossil fuels and started using "Green energy" sources, everything would be fine. Supporting nuclear power for instance. Wars would end, everybody would get three square meals a day, equity and social mobility for.
At least with Transition you gat to see the bigger picture. How Climate Change, Oil (energy), Economy ( local and Global) are all tied together and interdependant.
With regards to the Keep the Heat in campaign, do you find that people only hear "can save you money" and nothing about energy dependency, climate change, resilience. It's what they do with the money they have saved that worries me. If the money they "save" is then spend somewhere else creating more CO2 than was saved is the campaign still seen as a success. Also what about any jobs that were created and the knock on affects of that.
Sorry if i sound to much like a doomer, but if we are to reduce the amount of CO2 being produced, the Western ecomonies need to take a big hit, completely changing out lifestyles for ever.
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Extreme Veteran
Posts: 319
| The rebound effect has been studied. A quote from recent correspondence with a Green Councillor; 'The evidence on the rebound effect suggests it is very low - at most around 30% and is highest for those on low incomes who "comfort take". Since the evidence suggests in most cases they weren't heating their homes to a healthy temperature in the first place' ....then it's probably not something to worry too much about. We were mainly working with small businesses who are often on a knife edge for survival, so the alternative may well have been them going under and more supermarket lorries trundling up the A9. |
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Extreme Veteran
Posts: 319
| One of the problems is that although peak oil theory does predict that as prices rise more 'unconventional' oil such as Tar sands will be economic to extract and so there will be additional supplies coming into the equation it was probably quite difficult to be sure how large these supplies were going to be. Now we are seeing a boom of unconventional oils as well as increased fracking etc producing more gas which seems to be putting us on track to hit scary 6 degrees average temperature rise pretty quickly.
http://priceofoil.org/2012/10/25/oils-new-supply-boom-is-a-bust-for...
Saudi Arabia does seem to be changing tack domestically but still hoping that the rest of the world will continue to buy their oil when they have switched to solar etc themselves http://www.care2.com/causes/oil-soaked-saudi-arabia-sets-goal-of-10... |
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Veteran
Posts: 275
| I think the peak oil issue isn't so much the amount of oil, conventional or otherwise, it's the cost of getting it. Heinberg argues that we're approaching the point where the price of oil needed to justify developing new fields is so high that it causes recession, and then the oil price should fall again (though we don't seem to be seeing much of that last bit). That may be the case, but it also has to be said that historically we've been pretty good at finding better ways to extract more oil from existing fields, i.e. I have the impression that the EROI hasn't gone up as quickly as anticipated.
So maybe the thing is to talk about expensive oil (and energy as a whole) rather than peak oil - most people would, I think, agree that high prices are here to stay even if they don't like to think too much about them getting any higher. |
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Extreme Veteran
Posts: 319
| We are now apparently in a new geological era. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0104hcj
We are putting CO2 into the atmosphere about 10 times as fast as when the climate last 'flipped' so whilst the world has been here before in terms of no ice at the poles etc it was a long time before humans existed and a scary 25 metres sea level rise could eventually be on the cards. Even with less than a degree of warming storm surges can cause a considerable amount of devastation as America has just discovered but strangely nobody seems to be mentioning climate change. |
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Regular
Posts: 80
| I feel that more people are open to accepting "Climate Change" as the reason for super storms, droughts and flooding, but are still not prepared to accept that they are the cause. Because they are not prepared to accept the changes to their lifestyles that that would mean.
We are already starting to see a backlash toward On-Shore wind farms, probably backed by pro-nuclear power money, or as the shear scale of what is required is realised.
However, as this article suggests, lifestyles maybe starting to change anyway, although probably due to student debt rather than concerns about future life on this planet.
http://www.energybulletin.net/print/65266
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Peak oil- are we better to talk about climate change?