Month: February 2015

Sorry about jerky video. Audio is good. Analyst says oil could hit 20 bucks.

Yesterday, a major Oil CEO started making sensible noises about climate change, and the transition to renewables.  There are a number of reasons why, no doubt, including the burgeoning success of the Divestment movement, increasing awareness among big dollar investors of the “carbon bubble” – resources that must be left in the ground due to climate constraints, and the violent gyrations of the oil market in response to technological paradigm shift.

Normally, Econ 101 would predict that when you lower the price of an important commodity, demand would go up. Yet, that is not what we are seeing right now. There is an increasing, and for Big Oil, ominous, –  disconnect between GDP and oil demand.
This ain’t a normal correction, folks. This is an historic transition.

CNBC:

Goldman Sachs slashed its oil price forecasts, saying the market’s “new normal” for crude means it’s likely to remain lower for longer.

“The latest move is certainly a reflection of the clear shift in demand and supply fundamentals,” Timothy Moe, co-head of economics, commodities and strategy, told CNBC at Goldman Sachs’s strategy conference in London on Monday.
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“This bear market will likely be characterized by more of a U-shaped recovery in which markets take longer to recover and will likely rebound to far lower price levels from where they sold off from,” Goldman said in a note dated Sunday.

Carbon Brief:

The global oil market is entering a new phase where cheap oil is failing to ignite growth in demand, the International Energy Agency (IEA) says.

Demand growth will remain sluggish because of fuel switching, more fuel-efficient cars, reduced oil subsidies and structural changes in the global economy, according to the  IEA’s Medium-Term Oil Market Report, published today.

Market dynamics suggest oil demand should increase strongly in response to  falling oil prices, which have halved since last summer. But the IEA argues oil markets are entering a “business-as-unusual” phase, where the usual rules of supply and demand have changed.

The IEA says:

“The recent price decline is expected to have only a marginal impact on global demand growth… Projections of oil-demand growth have been revised downwards, rather than upwards, since the price drop.”

This phase will see oil demand continue to grow at 1.2 per cent per year to 2020, well below the near-two per cent rate of growth before the global financial crisis. There a range of reasons for this shift.

Continue reading “Despite Lower Prices, Oil Demand Flat. A New Normal?”

Common Dreams:

Alberta’s attempt to boost caribou numbers by killing wolves is an inhumane approach that fails to target the root of the problem—the extractivist industries—says a group scientists.

Explaining how the wolves came to be seen as the problem, Kaleigh Rogers writes at Vice:

See, roads and industrial development built to take advantage of Alberta’s rich natural resources has impacted the woodland habitat, in part allowing wolves to more easily gain access to the caribou herds. While the wolves aren’t to blame, they have been contributing to the diminishing caribou population and nearly wiped them out in some areas, so the government decided to introduce a systematic wolf cull to address the immediate problem.

 

Controversy erupted in November following the publication of an analysis in the Canadian Journal of Zoology, which, as CBC Newsreported at the time, assessed

the effect of a seven-year wolf cull in the northwestern Alberta range of the Little Smoky caribou herd — roughly 70 animals scratching out a living on land 95 per cent disturbed by forestry and energy development. Seismic lines and cutblocks from that development allow wolves deep into the undisturbed portions of the forest, adding further pressure.

In an attempt to keep caribou from disappearing, Alberta began an annual cull of about 45 per cent of the wolves on that range in 2005. By 2012, 841 wolves had been poisoned or shot from helicopters.

The wolf killing managed to keep the caribou population stable, but was just buying time for the caribou, the study found. As Emma Marris wrote in the journal Nature, the caribou population did not show an increase. “Such an increase would require placing new limits on industrial development in Alberta, a conclusion that adds fuel to an ongoing debate about the ecological consequences of human activity in the boreal forest,” she wrote of the study.

Meanwhile, the still-teasing-about-running-for-president, WTF quote generator, and sweetheart of climate deniers everywhere,  Sara Palin, had some tough love for whiny caribou. Continue reading “Caribou Pay the Price. Wolves Get the Blame. Kochs Get the $$.”

Wall Street Journal:

PLC Chief Executive Ben van Beurden is preparing to offer some criticism of the debate over climate-change policy, and his industry’s approach to it, at a London oil-industry conference on Thursday night.

In a speech — an excerpt of which the Journal obtained — Mr. van Beurden will tell a roomful of oil executives in formal wear that the industry should support policies to curb climate change, including a carbon-pricing system and “a shift from coal to natural gas.”
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The solution, Mr. van Beurden says, is for the industry to stop keeping “a low profile on the issue. I understand that tactic,” the speech says, “but in the end it’s not a good tactic.”
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“I’m well aware that the industry’s credibility is an issue,” the speech says.

“You cannot talk credibly about lowering emissions globally if, for example, you are slow to acknowledge climate change; if you undermine calls for an effective carbon price; and if you always descend into the ‘jobs versus environment’ argument in the public debate,” Mr. van Beurden plans to say.

Guardian:

“The outcome of the political process is uncertain, but the trends behind it are unmistakeable. Even more than the oil price, these trends will shape the future of the industry over the coming decades. For a sustainable energy future, we need a more balanced debate. ‘Fossil fuels out, renewables in’ – too often, that’s what it boils down to. Yet in my view, that’s simply naive,” he argues.

“Yes, climate change is real. And yes, renewables are an indispensable part of the future energy mix. But no, provoking a sudden death of fossil fuels isn’t a plausible plan,” he adds. Continue reading “ShellBOMB – Big Oil CEO Pivots on Carbon: Calls for “Carbon Pricing System””

Another high tech leader you may have heard of makes a big bet on renewable power.  They are not doing this for charity.

Bloomberg:

The agreement positions the CEO of the world’s biggest company at the center of the global debate about climate change and the future of energy—a role Cook has increasingly embraced over the past two years. The company has been ramping up its investment in solar, with two 20 Mw plants completed and a third under development in North Carolina, and a 20 Mw plant in development in Reno, Nev. All of Apple’s data centers are now powered by renewables.

“We know that climate change is real,” Cook said on Tuesday. “Our view is that the time for talk has passed, and the time for action is now. We’ve shown that with what we’ve done.”

Wind power has long been cheaper than solar, and such tech companies as Google, Microsoft, and Amazon have taken advantage by investing heavily in wind.

But the sun is the future. The price of solar has been declining quicker than that of wind, and by 2050 solar could be the world’s biggest single source of electricity, according to the International Energy Agency. The Apple deal is the first of its size for solar, a milestone on the road to cheap, unsubsidized power from the sun.
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Apple isn’t investing in solar as a gift to humanity. It’s doing it because it’s a good business deal, Cook stressed at the Goldman Sachs conference. “We expect to have very significant savings,” he said.

As if to underline that fact, within minutes of announcing the solar deal, Apple’s stock ended the trading day with a record valuation of $711 billion, making it the first U.S. company to cross the $700 billion mark. Shares of both Apple and First Solar surged.

The reason you are seeing so many high tech, silicon valley companies invest in solar is because, as the emerging distributed grid becomes more and more like the internet, companies with network expertise are grasping the potential, and the opportunity.

Elon Musk’s record as an engineer and entrepreneur is that he sees the future, and does what he says he’s going to do.
He’s announcing another step toward a distributed energy economy, as the electric utilities’ Kodak Moment draws ever nearer. Continue reading “Apple’s Huge Solar Play – Tesla Announces Batteries for Homes”

Every once in a while we can pull back the curtain and get a good look at the evil elves and Madison Avenue Orcs deployed by the fossil fuel barons. Look hard, climate deniers. This is the man pulling your strings.

Posted by a front group called the “Environmental Policy Alliance”, this corporate forged “viral” video popped up a couple days ago. Had to check and make sure this wasn’t a joke, but it’s real.

 

Check out the video above for the hilarious/bad caricature of Bill Mckibben, and for the ‘fossil fuel” girl friend, who I guess is supposed to be attractive, but unfortunately for the producers, looks disturbingly like “Mr Hanky” of South Park fame.  The piece is getting a lot of views, but maybe not for the reasons the client hoped.

Sourcewatch:

Big Green Radicals is a front group operated by the PR firm Berman & Co. Berman & Co. operates a network of dozens of front groups, attack-dog web sites, and alleged think tanks that work to counteract minimum wage campaigns, keep wages low for restaurant workers, and to block legislation on food safety, secondhand cigarette smoke, drunk driving, and more.

Big Green Radicals describes itself as “a project of the Environmental Policy Alliance (EPA), which exists to educate the public about the real agenda of well-funded environmental activist groups” according its website. “The EPA receives support from individuals, businesses, and foundations.”

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Richard Berman is the type of corporate hit man that Aaron Eckhart played in “Thank You For Smoking” – amoral, vicious, and dishonest.  PR guys like him usually don’t make the headlines, preferring to remain the man behind the curtain – but a few months ago he showed up in the New York Times, because recommendations he made in a  presentation were so vile and offensive that even members of the oil industry audience were disgusted.

NYTimes:

 If the oil and gas industry wants to prevent its opponents from slowing its efforts to drill in more places, it must be prepared to employ tactics like digging up embarrassing tidbits about environmentalists and liberal celebrities, a veteran Washington political consultant told a room full of industry executives in a speech that was secretly recorded.

The blunt advice from the consultant, Richard Berman, the founder and chief executive of the Washington-based Berman & Company consulting firm, came as Mr. Berman solicited up to $3 million from oil and gas industry executives to finance an advertising and public relations campaign called Big Green Radicals.

The company executives, Mr. Berman said in his speech, must be willing to exploit emotions like fear, greed and anger and turn them against the environmental groups. And major corporations secretly financing such a campaign should not worry about offending the general public because “you can either win ugly or lose pretty,” he said.

“Think of this as an endless war,” Mr. Berman told the crowd at the June event in Colorado Springs, sponsored by the Western Energy Alliance, a group whose members include Devon Energy, Halliburton and Anadarko Petroleum, which specialize in extracting oil and gas through hydraulic fracturing, also known as fracking. “And you have to budget for it.”

What Mr. Berman did not know — and what could now complicate his task of marginalizing environmental groups that want to impose limits on fracking — is that one of the energy industry executives recorded his remarks and was offended by them.

“That you have to play dirty to win,” said the executive, who provided a copy of the recording and the meeting agenda to The New York Times under the condition that his identity not be revealed. “It just left a bad taste in my mouth.”

Pdf of Berman’s presentation here.

Speaking of bad taste, “60 Minutes” profiled Berman as an attack dog for the purveyors of poisonous junk food, and he was proud enough of that to post it on his own Youtube channel, below. Continue reading “Thanks Dr. Evil! Fossil Fuel Propaganda Misfire Goes Viral”

Some touchy and nervous folks in the denialosphere yesterday, as Boston continued to get buried under a remarkable precipitation event, with more on the way.

Important to understand that a lot of folks hate to think rationally about the problem, because they think the solutions will be onerous and difficult.  It will only be difficult to the degree that we have wasted time and allowed a certain amount of change to be “baked in” – we’ll have to adapt.  But sustainable 21st century solutions are outcompeting 19th century energy around the world.  As they do, they will bring more personal freedom, more opportunity for entrepreneurship, and devolve power away from big governments, big institutions, big business, down to states, counties, townships, villages, small businesses, farmers, and individuals.

That message is getting thru, even to the hard-to-reach corners of the denio-sphere.

Climate Central:

The electric power industry is turning away from coal, and clean energy is growing again in the U.S. as investments in renewables increased in 2014 after a two-year decline.

Those are the conclusions of the 2015 Sustainable Energy in America Factbook report released jointly Wednesday by Bloomberg New Energy Finance and the Business Council for Sustainable Energy, which ranks the U.S. as second in the world behind China for clean energy investments in 2014.

“Against the backdrop of a surging economy and crumbling oil prices, major trends around decarbonization and improving energy productivity continued in the United States,” Michael Di Capua, head of Americas research for Bloomberg New Energy Finance, said in a statement.

U.S. investments in clean energy jumped to $52 billion in 2014 from $48 billion the previous year, a 8 percent increase. Bloomberg ranked China first globally with $89 billion in clean energy investments, up from $68 billion in 2013.

Greater financing for wind farms and rooftop solar drove U.S. renewables investments last year as the U.S. became the world’s second-largest market behind China for new wind turbine construction, and the third-largest for new solar power installations behind China and Japan.

Bloomberg highlights the decarbonization of the U.S. power sector, showing that 93 percent of all new U.S. electric power production capacity constructed since 2000 has come from lower-carbon sources including natural gas, wind, solar and other renewables.

Continue reading “Bob Inglis: We are All on the Record On Climate Change”

Fox News:

More than 2 feet of snow piled up in parts of New England by early Tuesday, breaking records set 37 years ago as forecasters warned still more winter weather was on the way.

The snowfall numbers in the area are staggering. Boston’s Logan Airport measured 72 inches of snow in the last two and a half weeks. In the last two days, the town of Norwell, which is outside Boston, got buried in 30 inches of snow.

Boston’s snowfall surpassed the Colorado ski resort town of Crested Butte.

Atmospheric scientist Michael Mann of  Penn State University weighs in on the meaning of Boston’s SnowmaGeddon event.

Washington Post:

You could treat this as ordinary weather, or, you could think about it in a climate context. Counter-intuitive though it may sound, the fact remains that — as I have noted previously — some kinds of winter precipitation could indeed be more intense because we’re in a warming world.

Consider, for instance, that sea surface temperatures off the coast of New England are flashing red, showing an extreme warm anomaly. That’s highly relevant — because warmer oceans have atmospheric consequences.

“Sea surface temperatures off the coast of New England right now are at record levels, 11.5C (21F) warmer than normal in some locations,” says Penn State climate researcher Michael Mann. “There is [a] direct relationship between the surface warmth of the ocean and the amount of moisture in the air. What that means is that this storm will be feeding off these very warm seas, producing very large amounts of snow as spiraling winds of the storm squeeze that moisture out of the air, cool, it, and deposit it as snow inland.”

Warmer oceans also increase the temperature contrasts that winter storms encounter when they hit the East Coast, notes Mann — and this ups their strength.

“Heavy snows mean the temperature is just below freezing, any cooler and the amount would be a lot less,” adds Kevin Trenberth, a climate expert at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. “Warmer waters off the coast help elevate winter temperatures and contribute to the greater snow amounts. This is how global warming plays a role.”

Yes, it might sound strange, but it can actually snow more when it’s a bit warmer — not too warm for snow, of course, but not extremely cold, either.

Below, climate denier and expert on all things Pat Robertson, explains that Boston snow proves there is no global warming. Continue reading “Mike Mann on the Meaning of Boston’s Snowmageddon”

How low will they go? The cruel, cowardly bastards.

Takepart.com:

Chances are you probably will never see a polar bear in the wild as the poster animal for climate change disappears along with its Arctic habitat. But as you hike through the mountains of the American West, you can still catch a glimpse of another improbably cute critter threatened by climate change.

Not for long.

Like the polar bear, the American pika is losing its home as rising temperatures force the pint-size mammal farther up the alpine slopes of the Rocky Mountains and the Sierra Nevada. Resembling a rabbit but more adorable, the pika drops dead if its body temperature rises more than 3 degrees Celsius (5.4 degrees Fahrenheit). Now a new study confirms that pika populations are indeed vanishing as the West warms. Researchers found that the animal could become extinct across 88 percent of its range in California in the coming decades.

Continue reading “Why Do Climate Deniers Want to Kill this Cute Baby Pika?”

Is Oil’s Kodak moment closer than we think?

Charged-The Electric Vehicles Magazine:

SolidEnergy, an MIT spin-out company commercializing solid electrolyte technology, plans to release a 20 Ah EV battery in 2017, which it says will offer more than two times the range of current Li-ion batteries.

The core of SolidEnergy’s technology is a Solid Polymer Ionic Liquid (SPIL) electrolyte, which enables the use of an ultra-thin lithium metal anode. According to the company, this improves cell-level energy density by 50% compared to graphite anodes and 30% compared to silicon-composite anodes.
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As SolidEnergy founder Dr. Qichao Hu and his colleagues at MIT noted in a 2011 paper in the Journal of Power Sources: “The use of conventional lithium-ion batteries in high temperature applications (>50° C) is currently inhibited by the high reactivity and volatility of liquid electrolytes. Solvent-free, solid-state polymer electrolytes allow for safe and stable operation of lithium-ion batteries, even at elevated temperatures. Recent advances in polymer synthesis have led to the development of novel materials that exhibit solid-like mechanical behavior while providing the ionic conductivities approaching that of liquid electrolytes.”

SolidEnergy is collaborating with A123 Venture Technologies, a Massachusetts-based technology incubator.