climate

Fracking good or fracking bad?

At the Feasta climate weekend in Wales last month David Knight gave a presentation on 'fracking': the use of unconventional methods for extracting natural gas. Fracking has become the subject of much controversy on both sides of the Atlantic as the energy industry lobbies for its widespread adoption. Knight discussed its viability in terms of energy return on investment, its potential as a pollutant and its effect on climate change. You can download his powerpoint slides from this site now, along with the script he used while giving the presentation.

Report from the McPlanet conference

Broken promises and naive expectations - that's how many people at the McPlanet Conference held recently in Berlin clearly felt about the last two decades of global environmental policy. They believe that an imperfect-but-better alternative exists: protecting and enhancing the commons and community-based protection of biological resources worldwide, including in regions such as sub-Saharan Africa where land-grabbing is currently rife.

Will the “economic price” limit oil production?

by Richard Douthwaite. In a widely-circulated article in September 2011, Chris Skrebowski, who runs a peak oil consulting firm and was editor of the Petroleum Review for eleven years until 2008, argued that there are two forms of oil peak. One is, or will be, caused directly by depletion – the oil is no longer in the ground in sufficient quantities for producers to be able to maintain production. The other is the economic oil peak, which he says is the “price at which oil becomes unaffordable to consume and therefore to produce.” Is this assessment realistic?