The Oil Drum

This is a guest post by Kate Lister. Kate, along with partner Tom Harnish, runs a web site called Undress4Success.com, which offers advice on work at home jobs, freelance opportunities, and home-based businesses. Kate and Tom are telecommuting researchers and authors; their academic study of the topic is balanced with practical lessons they've learned from over twenty years of home-based work and business ownership. They are currently working on a book, Undress4Success—The Naked Truth About Working From Home for John Wiley & Sons (March 2009). This will be their third book for Wiley.

This is a transcript of a speech by Richard K. Lester, MIT professor of nuclear science and engineering and director of the Industrial Performance Center, who spoke on 14 JUL 2008 at the annual meeting of the National Governors Association. The prepared version of Lester's speech is below the fold.

I found the speech interesting, so I thought I would bring it to you. A quote that particularly caught my eye is the following: "And so, to conclude, it is long past time for serious federal leadership on energy innovation. But it is also time to move beyond the Manhattan/Apollo Project metaphor. A better metaphor might be a domestic Marshall Plan for energy innovation. The original Manhattan project involved a relatively small number of people working in secret. The original Marshall Plan took everyone, working together, to rebuild the broken European economy."

The long awaited Garnaut report (pdf) is out at last, prompting an explosion of media analysis.

This post is a roundup of selected articles - I encourage you all to share your thoughts in the comments.

This is a guest post by Eugene Linden. Eugene's most recent book is Winds of Change: Climate, Weather, and the Destruction of Civilizations. Prior books include The Future in Plain Sight: Nine Clues to the Coming Instability. Over the years, Eugene has written for publications ranging from Parade to Foreign Affairs (for more complete list, please visit Eugene's site). In recent years Eugene has been publishing more and more on the web. Apart from his writing, he does a good deal of speaking, and also serves as chief investment strategist for Bennett Management, a family of hedge funds.

"The Speech I'd Like to Hear from a Presidential Candidate on Energy and Climate Change" by Eugene Linden

“As I stand here today on the shore of Lake Lanier in Georgia, I’m sure that many of you are wondering why I’ve chosen to talk about climate change when we face so many immediate problems. Climate change seems far away while the housing and credit crisis, unprecedented oil prices, expensive healthcare, a global food crisis, and the never-ending war in Iraq are right upon us.

These are all urgent issues, and the American people have every right to demand that a Presidential candidate address these problems with leadership and credible programs. Indeed, I’ve spent the great majority of my time in this campaign trying to lay out the way I would confront such issues should the voters entrust me with the Presidency.

But many of these problems, particularly energy prices, our national security and soaring food prices cannot be addressed in isolation. Moreover, changing climate feeds into a number of these immediate issues, and the threat of climate chaos may not be as far off as we might hope.

This is a guest post by Aaron Newton, who is working with coauthor Sharon Astyk on the forthcoming book, A Nation of Farmers. Aaron contributes at Groovy Green; he also blogs at Powering Down. Aaron is a land planner and garden farmer in suburban North Carolina, seeking ways to transform the current course of human land use development in an effort to prepare for the effects of global oil production peak and its outcome on automotive suburban America.

The notion of our standard work week here in America has remained largely the same since 1938. That was the year the Fair Labor Standards Act was passed, standardizing the eight hour work day and the 40 hour work week. Each Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday workers all over the country wake up, get dressed, eat breakfast and go to work. But the notion that the majority of the workforce should keep these hours is based on nothing more than an idea put forth but the Federal government almost 70 years ago. To be sure it was an improvement in the lives of many Americans who were at the time forced to work 10+ hours a day, sometimes 6 days of the week. So a 40 hour work week was seen as an upgrade in the lives of many of U.S. citizens. 8 is a nice round number; one third of each 24 hour day. In theory it leaves 8 hours for sleep and 8 hours for other activities like eating, bathing, raising children and enjoying life. But the notion that we should work for 5 of these days in a row before taking 2 for ourselves is, as best I can tell, rather arbitrary.

The idea of a shorter work week is not a new one to anyone old enough to have lived through the energy shocks of the 1970's. It should be fairly obvious to anyone interested in conserving oil that reducing the number of daily commutes per week would reduce the overall demand for oil. There are about 133 million workers in America. Around 80% of them get to work by driving alone in a car. The average commute covers about 16 miles each way.

So let's stop and do some math...and I'll try to argue for 16 reasons why a four day work week is a good idea.

The Liberal Party has markedly changed its tune on solar power since it got kicked out of office, with shadow environment minister Greg Hunt calling for a national feed in tariff for solar power and declaring he "has a vision of Australia becoming a solar continent" at the Climate Action Network Australia Conference in Sydney.

Hunt went on to say ""giant dishes, large fields of mirrors, these are one of the forms of power stations of the future" and "an important part of Australia's future energy" - all of which indicates he is on board with the vision of large scale solar thermal power.

This is a guest post by Aaron Newton, who is working with coauthor Sharon Astyk on the forthcoming book, A Nation of Farmers. Aaron contributes at Groovy Green; he also blogs at Powering Down. Aaron is a land planner and garden farmer in suburban North Carolina, seeking ways to transform the current course of human land use development in an effort to prepare for the effects of global oil production peak and its outcome on automotive suburban America.

There is little doubt that during that last 60 years we here in America have transformed our manmade landscape in a way that is fundamentally different from any form of human habitation ever known. While many have flocked to this new way of organizing the spaces in which we live, critics have noticed the shortcomings and have loudly pointed them out. It’s been suggested that the development of the suburbs here in the U.S. was a really bad idea. Author James Kunstler describes suburbia as, ‘the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world.’ The ability of most citizens to own and cheaply operate an automobile means we’ve had access to a level of mobility never before experienced. The outgrowth of which has been a sprawling pattern of living that changed the rules about how and where we live, work, and play and how we get there and back. We are now more spread out than ever before, mostly getting back and forth from one place to another by driving alone in our cars. This could turn out to be a really bad thing.

This is a guest post by Garry Glazebrook, who is an urban transport consultant and urban planning lecturer at the University of Technology, Sydney. The Sustainable Futures Fund is described in the Australian context, but with our population of 21 million and a local currency approaching 1:1 with the US dollar, the figures suggested here could be considered comparable with those required in a moderate size state in the USA.

Readers of TOD are well aware of the oil supply threat and its implications for society. Recent reports such as “Crude Oil – The Supply Outlook” by Energy Watch Group suggest global oil production could fall 50% by 2030, while research by Jeff Rubin at CIBC suggests OECD countries will experience an 8% fall in supply by 2012 due to delays in Megaprojects, declining production from existing fields and strong oil demand growth in OPEC, Russia and China.

This post looks at the role the USA plays in global grain (wheat, corn, sorghum) and soybean (soya bean) trade, since the USA is to a large extent the world's breadbasket and there are concerns over this role in the light of the current corn-to-ethanol expansion. The article begins by looking, very briefly, at how similar concerns were raised about 20 years ago, due to the potential effects of global warming on US grain production.

The following is a guest post by TOD reader Doug Fir. 'Doug' graduated in the 70's with a BS and a MS in Fisheries, Forestry, and Agriculture. Presently, he and his family work a small hay, timber and livestock operation. The policies impacting climate change legislation are linked in complicated ways to energy depletion. If anthropogenic induced climate change ends up being real and urgent, it will have direct impacts on energy and food production. For these reasons we periodically post thoughtful analysis on the topic of climate change here on theoildrum.com.

The consequences of climate change are often presented in the media as coastal flooding after the melt of Greenland or Antarctic ice. That is the headline most often seen, however the real problems will be much more extensive. I'd like to look at some of those problems, in particular those of wildfire and agriculture, and provide a little background to better illustrate their severity.