tate423, another daily visitor at The Oil Drum, found a very interesting story at Bloomberg:
Peak Oil Forecasters Win Converts on Wall Street to $200 Crude
The article broadly introduces the Peak Oil to the Bloomberg business readership, and introduces most of the players. Recommended.
The Chrysler Group, which depends more heavily on sales of pickup trucks and sport utility vehicles than any other Detroit automaker, said Monday that it expected gasoline prices to remain at $3 to $4 a gallon for the rest of this decade.
- more here
Its proposal attracted little attention, since it didn’t mean better dishwashers or more fuel-efficient cars. Instead, it deals with transformers – those ubiquitous gray canisters that hang from utility poles and could save the nation billions of dollars if they were upgraded.
The question is how extensive the upgrade should be. Besides saving an estimated $9 billion in electricity costs, the Bush administration standard, unveiled Aug. 4, may also eliminate the need to build 11 new power plants over a 28-year period, the Department of Energy (DOE) reports. They would also reduce pollution and boost the reliability of the nation’s electric grid.
But instead of celebrating the proposal, energy and environment advocates say DOE has opted for “a very weak proposal” – one that fails to save additional mountains of energy and pollution that a slightly tougher regulation would achieve for about the same cost. The tougher standard would save much more than the DOE proposal over 28 years – about 120 billion kilowatt hours of electricity – or enough energy to power 10 percent of US households for a year, they say.
- more here
A group of climate scientists from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) in Germany has used data from the last great Ice Age to conclude that a doubling of carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere would cause a global temperature increase of around 3 ºC. This is in line with previous estimates using other methods, mainly computer models.
- more here
I happened to visit Hsi Lai Buddhist Temple a few days ago. There is a half-hour self-guided audio tour, a tea room, and a cafeteria for a vegetarian lunch. It was a nice experience. If you pass through Hacienda Heights, California, I recommend it.
For trivia buffs, this is the place where Al Gore picked up his red envelope.
What does it really mean?
Now that SB1, the Million Solar Roofs bill, survived the political gauntlet of the California legislature and was signed into law, the solar community and the more attentive among the homebuilding industry are considering what impact the bill may have on the installation of solar energy on new homes. Some say maybe quite a bit less than was hoped for.
- more here
I think I’m fairly neutral on the bill myself. It’s not that perfect, but neither is it that harmful.
We know that bacteria in our intestines can be extremely helpful partners. That is why it strikes me as a very dumb idea to upset that balance with a commercial blend of bacteria-killing viruses:
A mix of bacteria-killing viruses can be safely sprayed on cold cuts, hot dogs and sausages to combat common microbes that kill hundreds of people a year, federal health officials said Friday in granting the first-ever approval of viruses as a food additive.
- more on the viruses here
This is bad news for me, as I use the weekend to study up on new server technologies:
THEY say that you can’t teach an old dog new tricks. And scientists have discovered why.
Researchers at Harvard Medical School believe that they have found the biological mechanism that makes people become set in their ways as they get older. They have identified a protein that stops new neural connections forming in adult brains.
- more here
Intended as a tribute to urban chicken farmers of Portland, Oregon, this shirt looks like fine mountain biking style to me. Given that I plan on being a little more chicken in the future.
The mini-crises relating to oil production springing up during the last few weeks seem to have settled down for a while. There is a ceasefire in Lebanon . Iraq has patched up its northern export pipeline for the umpteenth time. BP has figured out that they only have to shut down half the production from Prudhoe Bay . There are no hurricanes in sight, and we have another two weeks before having to do something about Iran ’s refusal to shut down its uranium enrichment facilities.
All this tranquility gives us a few days to think ahead about what we are going to need to do when peak oil arrives. The first big problem we will confront when gasoline gets real, real expensive is what are we going to do with those 210+ million oil-powered cars, SUVs, vans, and pickups that are running around our country.
- more here