Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Brent, Brent crude, energy, Greece, Iran, North Sea, oil price, oil production, peak oil, price of oil, Reuters, WTI
Crude oil output from the North Sea, home of the global Brent benchmark, is set to fall in March for a third month due to maintenance work and natural aging of oilfields there.
Supply will average 2.18 million barrels per day in March, down 1.4 percent from 2.12 million bpd the previous month, data compiled by Reuters showed on Tuesday.
via Brent tops $120 on Iran, North Sea, Greece | Reuters.
This report was the product of at least four reporters and two editors.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: bank bailouts, banksters, Fitch upgrades Iceland, Golden Slacks, Golden Staxxx, Goldman Sachs, Goldmine Sacks, Iceland
While Greece and Europe continue sinking ever deeper into the colonial quicksand of Pax Goldmania, Iceland, which blew up, pushed its banks into bankruptcy, and arrested its corrupt bankers, is well on its way to being the world’s only normal country.
via In The Meantime Iceland Is #Winning | ZeroHedge.
Filed under: maps | Tags: Ballard, Burke Gilman, Burke-Gilman Trail, Cascade Bicycle Club, PCC, Portland Cement Concrete, Seattle
This ruling makes the planned and funded 2012 construction unlikely but the proponents of the trail are convinced that the City will again be able to show that the trail extension will not have a probable significant adverse impact on the environment, as was determined in last year’s SDOT review.
via Completion of the Burke Gilman Missing Link delayed once again | Ballard News-Tribune.
Do it right with Portland Cement Concrete, not that Seattle asphalt cement concrete.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Coos Bay, Cove Point, energy exports, energy independence, liquefaction, LNG, Natural gas, natural gas exports
RIGZONE – Bills Seek to Ban U.S. LNG Exports.
At least, pass something to outlaw any gas company that exports from the US from making happy talk about “energy independence.”
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: EIA, energy, historic price predictions, make-a me laugh, oil price predictions, peak oil, petroleum, Super Wrong, wrong
This was the EIA’s thought on future oil prices just nine years ago:
From an article on EIA predictions at Seeking Alpha: http://seekingalpha.com/article/363431-flawed-oil-forecasts-hide-continued-upward-pressure-on-prices
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: energy, gas prices, january 2012 gas prices, oil consumption, oil demand, peak oil
From Zero Hedge: http://www.zerohedge.com/news/january-gas-prices-all-time-highs
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: CBO, Congressional Budget Office, energy, gas tax, Highway Trust Fund, House transportation bill, transportation
That’s the CBO’s projected shortfall for the Highway Trust Fund in 10 years, if the House Transportation Bill passes.
click to enlarge
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: active commuting, active commuting to school, childhood obesity, House of Representatives, House transportation bill, Kaiser Permanente, Safe Routes to School, Scott Gee
Kaiser’s Scott Gee in SF Gate, playing the health angle:
U.S. House wrongly eliminated Safe Routes funding.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: bicycle industry, bicycle manufacturing, China, Chinese bicycle industry, electric bicycles, electric bikes
Manufacturers believe exports will grow quickly, especially to Europe and North America, which accounted for more than 70% of the nearly 1m bikes sent abroad in 2009. One in every eight bicycles sold in the Netherlands these days is electric. Better yet, Chinese manufacturers secured an average price of $377 per exported bike, compared with less than $100 three years ago and just $46 for a pedal bike.
via China's electric-bicycle boom: Pedals of fire | The Economist.
The electric bike: Inherits almost all of the disadvantages of a regular bike, and jettisons the health effect. Most of the danger of a motorcycle, without the health benefit of a bicycle.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: carbon emissions, Carnegie Mellon, CO2, delusion and desperation, EVs, Green Car Congress, green cars, greenhouse gases, LDVs, Mashayekh, oil consumption, peak oil, transportation
The impossibility of “green cars” must be apparent at this point. EVen to people at websites called “Green Car Congress:” http://www.greencarcongress.com/2012/02/mashayekh-20120212.html
After considering a wide range of possible strategies to reduce light-duty vehicle greenhouse gas emissions, a team from Carnegie Mellon University, RAND Corporation and the University of Toronto has concluded that no one strategy will be sufficient to meet GHG emissions reduction goals to avoid climate change. Strategies considered included fuel and vehicle options; low-carbon and renewable power; travel demand management; and land use changes.
However, they also found that many of these changes have positive combinatorial effects, “so the best strategy is to pursue combinations of transportation GHG reduction strategies to meet reduction goals.” As a result, they recommended that agencies need to broaden their agendas to incorporate such combinations in their planning. Their policy paper is published in the ACS journal Environmental Science & Technology.
So, if we still want to drive around everywhere , we’re left with all these non-effective strategies for reducing emissions. Solution? Implement all these non-effective strategies at the same time!
…
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: bicycle accidents, bicycle and pedestrian accidents, bicycling accidents, bicycling safety, Boulder, child cycling, City of Boulder, collisions
This graphic from the Daily Camera article on the subject.
click to enlarge
I wrote a little about this study here.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: banking crisis, debt default, default, euro, eurozone, EZ, Spain, unemployment
From a post on Naked Capitalism.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Cove Point, energy, fracking, hydraulic fracturing, LNG, LNG exports, natural gas exports
East Coast LNG import facility will probably be changed to an export facility. This development results in higher prices for American consumers, while our water gets fracked. In contrast — it is illegal to export crude oil produced in the US.
Dominion, based in Richmond, Va., has won approval from the Department of Energy to use Cove Point for exporting liquefied natural gas to about 20 nations with which the United States has free-trade agreements. The company is now seeking federal permission to allow shipments to virtually any foreign country, except those barred because of trade embargoes.
via Marcellus shale fracking: Natural gas exports eyed through Calvert County – Baltimore Sun.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: contamination, decontamination, fake decontamination, Fukushima, OMFG, radiation
Amateur cleanup, pro revenue. Nuke companies make the mess, then make a profit pretending to clean it up. Is there a Corexit for nuclear accidents?
It was these same three companies that helped build 45 of Japan’s 54 nuclear plants — including the reactor buildings and other plants at Fukushima Daiichi that could not withstand the tsunami that caused a catastrophic failure — according to data from Citizens’ Nuclear Information Center, a watchdog group.
One of them, the Taisei Corporation, leads the consortium that sent out the workers now tramping around Iitate in hazmat suits. Consortiums led by Taisei and the other two big companies — Obayashi and Kajima — among them received contracts for the government’s first 12 pilot decontamination projects, totaling about $93 million.
“It’s a scam,” said Kiyoshi Sakurai, a critic of the nuclear industry and a former researcher at a forerunner to the Japan Atomic Energy Agency, which is overseeing this phase of decontamination. “Decontamination is becoming big business.”
via After Fukushima Disaster, a Confused Effort at Cleanup – NYTimes.com.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: batteries, China, dysprosium, Japan, lanthanum, rare earth
A rare earth metal controlled by China. Japan will try to use less.
http://news.yahoo.com/japan-slash-heavy-rare-earth-china-tightens-grip-093552135.html
Dysprosium is the rare earth metal for Dystopia. I learned that in my Dysprosium symposium which meets Tuesdays and Thursdays.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: bicycle, bicycling, bikes and red lights, cycling, France, Idaho stop, red lights, traffic law, transportation, urban cycling
France gets all reasonable about bicycles and red lights.
The newly relaxed rules of the road for cyclists is now being tested across 15 intersections in Paris, though with it bike-commuters aren’t given full liberty to blow through crossing points unreasonably. Law will continue to require that cyclists yield to pedestrians and opposing traffic, though that’s quite likely consistant with the standards of etiquette and personal safety most cyclists abide to anyways.
via France Grants Cyclists the Right to Run Red Lights : TreeHugger.
Maybe now American advocacy groups will get behind the idea. They haven’t in the past. But they seem to love anything remotely Euro-flavored, so it wouldn’t surprise me if this caused a noticeable uptick in Idaho Stop-related chatter around here.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: brine, Cooperstown, frac, fracing, fracking, fracking brine, fracking waste, hydraulic fractuing, Love Canal, Pittsfield, radionucleides
There is some poetic justice there.
According to the agency’s website, state regulations give the DEC “jurisdiction over waste material which is to be beneficially used.”
The spreading of gas brine in Pittsfield by a firm called Al-Kleen Inc. of Earleville was permitted by the DEC in 2010, according to state records.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: electric cars, EVs, green cars, greenest cars, Mitsubishi, PHEVs, Volt
The whole concept of a “green car” is absurd. No matter how you slice it, the personal auto is a wildly extravagant use of energy, not to mention space.
http://money.cnn.com/galleries/2012/autos/1202/gallery.aceee-greenest-cars/index.html
Industrialized Cyclist Notepad 