Kurt Cobb
sastyk | August 2, 2012I somehow forgot to draw your attention to Kurt Cobb's wonderful essay on the difference between oil and "liquids" - he does a better job than anyone I know in making clear what most Americans simply don't know about our energy - all liquid fuels are not equivalent. We have been told by implication that they are, and most people are not technically literate enough about oil and energy issues to understand the difference, so it looks like there's plenty of oil - but of course, this isn't oil at all. We could just as easily call it "oil."
But first, an important question. Why do government…
sastyk | July 3, 2012I can't really blame George Monbiot or anyone else for buying the narrative hype. Right now the overwhelming narrative is that we have no energy constraints at all. Folks wonder aloud whether the US should join OPEC. Increasingly ridiculous projections are made about the potential of shale oil and new drilling techniques. Slight upticks are assumed to be headed to their logical extremes, and Harvard's Kennedy School of Government issues a report saying we've got all the oil we could ever want. So is it really surprising that Monbiot, who has been focused on climate change, not peak oil…
sastyk | May 21, 2012The always-thoughtful Kurt Cobb has a great piece on the intersection between the hydrofracking boom and the mortgage mess:
One fact ought to tell you all you need to know about the risks faced by homeowners signing leases for natural gas drilling on their property: Wells Fargo & Company, both the largest home mortgage lender in the United States and a major lender to the country's second largest producer of natural gas, Chesapeake Energy Corp., refuses to make home loans for properties encumbered with natural gas drilling leases.
This salient fact comes from an article (PDF) written for…
sastyk | April 25, 2011Kurt Cobb has a very funny essay that argues that plants and animals have joined with the climate denialists to bring about the better for them "World Without Us":
The reversal of strategy began when domestic cats and dogs watched the Life After People series on The History Channel along with their putative owners. The cats and dogs then described scenes from the show to their wild counterparts. From there word swept through the animal kingdom and was overheard by many plants as well.
Life After People seemed like a utopian fantasy until some enterprising house plants realized that they might…
sastyk | March 15, 2011Sundry stuff on a busy day - and a day when everyone is transfixed by world events.
First, my colleage at Dean's Corner has offered a good guide to high tech ways to donate money to Japan relief. There are 10,000 people in Japan who haven't eaten since Friday by the best estimation, and events are adding to the horror. If you want to help, these are some simple ways.
Second, the always thoughtful Kurt Cobb has a great essay everyone should read about the deflationary impact of high oil prices:
The logic is so simple it's hard to understand why smart people with advanced degrees can't see it…
sastyk | January 10, 2011Just an update - all the copies of Prelude in circulation are presently going 'round, but if past experience is any guide, the books should have at least one more cycle before the end of the month. So watch here for the next announcement.
In some ways I'm not the optimal audience for Kurt Cobb's _Prelude_ in that I generally hate thrillers. I find the "ordinary person caught up in a chase sequence" thing silly, and while I can read science fiction and suspend belief long enough to believe in wormholes and colonization, or mysteries, and believe that the town of Whateverville experiences a…