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a community peak oil portal
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| George Soros: The Perilous Price of Oil |
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 The following is adapted from testimony given by George Soros before the US Senate Commerce Committee Oversight Hearing on June 3, 2008.
In January 2007, the price of oil was less than $60 per barrel. By the spring of 2008, the price had crossed $100 for the first time, and by mid-July, it rose further to a record $147. At the end of August it remains over $115, a 90 percent increase in just eighteen months. The price of gasoline at the pump has risen commensurately from an average of $2.50 to around $4 a gallon during this period. Transportation and manufacturing costs have risen sharply as well. All this has occurred at the same time as a world credit crisis that started with the collapse of the US housing bubble. The rising cost of oil, coming on top of the credit crisis, has slowed the world economy and reinforced the prospect of a recession in the US.
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| Bush likely to scrap nuclear deal with Russia |
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| The United States is likely to scrap a civilian nuclear pact with Russia soon as punishment for its war against Georgia last month, a U.S. official said on Thursday.
While the U.S. government has announced plans to give U.S. ally Georgia over $1 billion in reconstruction aid, it has yet to hit Moscow with any concrete sanctions for the military incursion deep into Georgian territory last month.
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| Cost of oil could dim a solar light |
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 Mark Bent wrestles with oil prices. Never mind that crude futures have fallen $20 a barrel from their record in July.
Bent's company, Houston-based SunNight Solar, has seen costs for shipping its solar-powered flashlights rise by about 30 percent so far this year, and they show no sign of abating.
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| Demand for solar panels exceeds supply |
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| The sun may set early on anyone trying to take advantage of expiring solar-energy tax credits this year.
Many solar manufacturers and installers say they can't take on more jobs for 2008 because they're either out of panels or out of time.
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| Oil demand decreases as economy slows down |
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 On Friday, the prices of the oil fell to the lowest point in five months due to economic slowdown and investors are worried that it will lead to low demand for the energy.James Cordier, portfolio manager of OptionSellers.com, said that the attention of the oil market will not be distracted from lowering economy and the decrease in the demand of the products. Cordier said, “What will win out is that the economy is weakening faster than expected, and that will continue to be psychologically bearish for oil.”
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 Upon recent discoveries of oil in the kingdom, King Abdullah ordered that those new finds be left untapped to preserve the nation's oil wealth for future generations. "When there were new finds, I told them, 'No, leave it in the ground, with grace from God, our children need it,'" the king said.
Behind the king's statement lies a plain truth: The Saudis prefer to sit on their oil, while we are rushing to deplete ours. The Saudi reserve-to-production ratio - an indicator of how long proven reserves would last at current production rates - is 70 years; Iran's is 82; the United Arab Emirates' is 90; and Venezuela's is 91. Iraq and Kuwait are at more than 100. How long does the U.S. have left? Eleven years.
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| Coal shortage to continue in India |
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| The shortage of coal will continue in India in near future. Ernst & Young (E&Y) has prepared a plan on proper supply of coal in the domestic market. It has recommended increase in the domestic coal production and contract mining to tame the shortage. It has also stressed the need of inclusion of private sector in the mining process along with foreign direct investment.
The report is released by Power Minister Sushilkumar Shinde at the India Coal Summit 2008 under the title ‘Coal — unearthing its potential in India’. The report has forecasted increase in domestic production by 680 million tonnes by 2012. The demand for fuel will increase in the near future to 10 percent. The report has pointed out that the demand would be balanced through import of fuel by 2012
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| Is our taste for Sunday roast killing the planet? |
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 Raj Patel, author of Stuffed and Served (Portobello Books) believes growing food for animals is a waste of resources in an overcrowded world.
'The average meat eater in the US produces about 1.5 tonnes of carbon dioxide more than a vegetarian every year. That's because animals are hungry and the grain they eat takes energy, usually fossil fuels, to produce,' he says.
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| Shun meat, says UN climate chief |
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| People should consider eating less meat as a way of combating global warming, says the UN's top climate scientist.
Rajendra Pachauri, who chairs the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), will make the call at a speech in London on Monday evening.
UN figures suggest that meat production puts more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than transport.
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| Julian Darley: The Energy Secret |
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| Understanding What Drives The 21st Century And Why Peak Oil Really Matters
There are at least two invisible things that tend to be ferociously difficult to understand. One is relations among humans and the other is energy. Especially when the former want more of the latter. And for some reason, understandable perhaps but also unfortunate, we are mostly loathe to try to comprehend where our energy comes from. Thus there is a kind of 'energy secret': we cannot see energy and we don't seem to be very good at understanding it, even though without it there is no life here or anywhere else in the universe.
These difficulties of understanding play out at every level from buying groceries to geopolitics. And yet though energy itself is invisible, its effects are visible everywhere, including this last week in the form of Hurricane Gustav, and a string of storms and hurricanes coming in behind it, lining up to hit the south east US. Gustav, though it has fortunately left New Orleans largely unscathed, has killed many people in the Caribbean.
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| Game Design Sketchbook: Crude Oil |
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| ...Oil isn't like corn or some other renewable commodity, where the amount you produce and sell this year has no limiting effect on how much you might be able to produce next year. If you pump all your oil out today and sell it at today's price, you won't have any to sell at tomorrow's price. What if tomorrow's price is much better than today's price? Sit-and-wait starts to sound like a more attractive strategy than pump-and-sell, especially if we are on the verge of an emergency-scale oil shortage. Of course, you'd want to be grabbing as many leases as you could in the mean time, not to pump-and-sell, but to add to your will-pump-someday holdings. On the other hand, if you withhold supply too much, people will learn to live with less oil, demand will weaken, and the price bubble will burst. We saw that happen toward the end of this past summer, as demand reacted negatively to high gas prices. Hybrid cars are all the rage now, and oil just isn't selling like it used to.
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| Global warming greatest in past decade |
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| Graeme writes: Researchers confirm that surface temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere were warmer over the last 10 years than any time during the last 1300 years, and, if the climate scientists include the somewhat controversial data derived from tree-ring records, the warming is anomalous for at least 1700 years.
"Some have argued that tree-ring data is unacceptable for this type of study," says Michael Mann, associate professor of meteorology and geosciences and director of Penn State's Earth System Science Center. "Now we can eliminate tree rings and still have enough data from other so-called 'proxies' to derive a long-term Northern Hemisphere temperature record."
The proxies used by the researchers included information from marine and lake sediment cores, ice cores, coral cores and tree rings.
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| Floating nuclear power plant gets new ''birthplace'' |
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| MOSCOW - In a couple of years, a new kind of vessel will appear at sea: the floating nuclear power plant (FNPP). The Academician Lomonosov, currently under construction in Russia, is only one project of several being developed so far.
The formal keel laying ceremony took place in April 2007 at the Sevmash shipyard of the Russian State Center for Nuclear Shipbuilding in Severodvinsk, Arkhangelsk Region. After about a year and a half, the state-owned corporation Rosatom revoked the general contract, handing it over to the Baltiysky Zavod (Baltic Plant) Shipyard in St. Petersburg. So now the birthplace of the first-ever floating nuclear power plant will be the Baltic Sea instead of the White Sea.
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| It never hurts to be prepared for Armageddon |
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| In an emergency, you want to be the go-to gal with all the answers
Depletion and Abundance: Life on the New Home Front, by Sharon Astyk (New Society Publishers; $18.95) is subtitled One Woman's Solutions to Finding Abundance for Your Family While Coming to Terms With Peak Oil, Climate Change and Hard Times. A few suggestions from Appendix One:
- Urine is mostly sterile, and safe to add to plants. A person's yearly output can fertilize more than one quarter acre. Dilute the urine in a 10 to one ratio and use it on your garden.
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| UK: Allotments get night guards as credit crunch sparks vegetable thefts |
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| Allotment-holders are introducing security patrols after a surge in fruit and vegetable thefts which has been blamed on rising food prices.
Gardeners fear that with economic conditions worsening and household budgets under strain, people are stealing produce in order to save themselves money at the checkouts.
A series of raids have prompted the Ottery St Mary allotment committee in Devon to launch evening patrols, with members visiting the set to keep an eye out for suspicious characters.
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