Category Archives: Oil

Fossil fuel subsidies 6% of world GDP: more than all govt health care spending in world

End fossil fuel subsidies and cut CO2 emissions by 20%, also removing any need for renewable energy subsidies.

Fossil fuels subsidised by $10m a minute, says IMF: ‘Shocking’ revelation finds $5.3tn subsidy estimate for 2015 is greater than the total health spending of all the world’s governments,

300x251 Subsidies as percent of global GDP, in How Large Are Global Energy Subsidies?, by David Coady, Ian Parry, Louis Sears, and Baoping Shang, 1 May 2015 Fossil fuel companies are benefitting from global subsidies of $5.3tn (£3.4tn) a year, equivalent to $10m a minute every day, according to a startling new estimate by the International Monetary Fund.

The IMF calls the revelation “shocking” and says the figure is an “extremely robust” estimate of the true cost of fossil fuels. The $5.3tn subsidy estimated for 2015 is greater than the total health spending of all the world’s governments.

The vast sum is largely due to polluters not paying the costs imposed on governments by the burning of coal, oil and gas. These include Continue reading →

Divest Harvard is winning, and we all will win sun, wind, and water power

Changing the world is hard and takes courage, but that’s why we will win. Bill Sargent had given up on global projects and turned to smaller local problems where it seemed there was a greater change of making a real difference. He wrote for Harvard Heat Week 27 April 2015, Heat Week: Teaching An Old Dog New Tricks,

But then I met Divest Harvard. Here was a group of bright, eager, sleep-deprived young undergraduates and grad students — free of such skepticism and willing to take on both Big Oil and the richest University in the world in one fell swoop.

He listed a number of ways Divest Harvard is winning because they chose the biggest targets under adverse conditions. For example: Continue reading →

VSU President’s Committee votes to divest from fossil fuels

Students, staff, faculty, and administration all say divest from fossil fuels. What will the VSU Foundation do now? One year after the committee was appointed 10 April 2014, it made a decision 8 April 2015:

S.A.V.E. applauds the decision by the President’s Special Committee on Campus Sustainability to support fossil fuel divestment. Leadership and stewardship are part and parcel to Valdosta State’s role as an institution of higher education and we call on VSU to honor these ethos by divesting from fossil fuels, ending its profiteering from ecological harm, environmental destruction, and human suffering.

Benjamin Vieth, the representative of Students Against Violating the Environment (S.A.V.E.) on that Committee, sent the above announcement after approval by S.A.V.E. Among other organizations included on that committee, Continue reading →

Renewables outcompete oil –National Bank of Abu Dhabi

A Middle East bank says:

300x309 Ambitious scenario, in Financing the Future of Energy, by National Bank of Abu Dhabi, March 2015 Renewables accounted for 57 per cent of global power investment in new generation in the period 2000-2013.

And that’s even with all the legal and financial roadblocks thrown up by entrenched fossil fuel companies and electric utilities. The report recommends aligning policy and finance:

To deliver a sustainable energy system for the long term, the financial community and policymakers need to work collaboratively: stimulating and de-risking investment, and developing innovative structures which can support the financing of future energy.

With that collaboration, the Middle East and North Africa could see this kind of energy deployment scenario: Continue reading →

Charges and findings for Quebec oil train explosion

Low-level employees taking the fall for railroad company executives, that’s what we can see in the future of yesterday’s West Virginia oil train explosion by looking at one in Quebec in 2013. Can we expect any different behavior from fracked methane pipeline executives?

Roger Annis, Truthout, 23 June 2014, What Happened in Last Summer’s Oil Train Disaster in Quebec That Killed 47,

Details of the events leading to last July’s oil train disaster in Lac Megantic, Quebec, have been made public for the first time. They reinforce an existing portrait of the accident as a perfect storm of corporate malfeasance.

Insufficient handbrakes applied, instead Continue reading →

Another oil train crashes and burns: CSC CSX near Charleston WV

Yet another fireball, water supply turned off, state of emergency, from an oil train. When did you last hear of a solar farm explosion? Do we expect hastily-built and unnecessary fracked methane pipelines to be any safer than these shoddy exploding shale oil train tank cars? How long must fossil fuel fireballs rain down before we all get on with clean sun, wind, and water to power the world?

Fireball above Boomer, WV; Photo credit: Deslyne Copening

Marcus Constantino, Multimedia reporter and Matt Murphy, Charleston Daily Mail, 16 February 2015, Crude oil train derails in Fayette County, WV, Continue reading →

Pipelines are bad economics: invest in renewable energy instead –Harvard

Let’s stop wasting money on the slide-rule technology of Keystone XL or Sabal Trail: they’re both bad investments, either short-term or long-term.

Andrew Winston wrote for Harvard Business Review 30 January 2015, Why the Keystone Pipeline Is the Wrong U.S. Energy Debate,

In the short run, with oil at $50 per barrel, Keystone will connect refineries to oil that may be unprofitable to extract. In the long run, as the world turns away from fossil fuels aggressively, the pipeline will be moot — a relic of the past.

Either way it’s a poor investment.

What, then? Continue reading →

Fixing climate change is profitable

Batteries are just one of many reasons, including electric vehicles, smart grid, solar and wind power (including pass HB 57 and you can profit by getting financing for your own solar panels), plus massive savings on health care and electricity bills; batteries are one of many reasons that fixing climate change will save us all money, clean up our air and water, expand our forests, preserve property rights, and make some people rich:

In fact, a recent report suggests that revenue from the distributed energy storage market — meaning battery packs and other storage devices located directly at homes and businesses (many of which now generate electricity through solar) — could exceed $16.5 billion by 2024. Another report predicts $68 billion in revenue in the same time frame from the grid-scale storage market. This includes large-scale battery packs, hydro-storage systems that use cheap abundant electricity to pump water uphill to drive turbines later on, or even solar thermal systems that store energy as heat in molten salt.

And it’s all happening fast, so fast your jaw will drop if you’re not paying attention. So let’s stop talking about the costs of fixing climate change. It’s not just no-cost and free, not just in the future but right now; we’re all actually going to be better off through fixing climate change: healthier and more prosperous.

Sami Grover wrote Continue reading →

TVA needs to listen to former chair S. David Friedman about solar power

Will you bet on the blinkered money-only policies of the current TVA Chair, or the accurate clean solar future predictions of former TVA Chair S. David Friedman?

Seven years ago S. David Friedman wrote:

“As a substitute for oil, coal, and nuclear energy, the sun can replace the three poisons with inexhaustible fuel.”

The former TVA Chairman wrote that in 2007 his boook Winning Our Energy Independence: An Energy Insider Shows How, which also says (page 4):

There are breakthroughs in new technology that promise to make the cost of solar power as low as that of coal, nuclear, and oil. Almost simultaneously in South Africa and the Silicon Valley in the United States, companies are building huge new solar factories to manufacture a paper-thin solar coating that can generate electricity that could actually lower our electric bills. These breakthroughs promise solar power at 75 percent less than today’s price. Continue reading →

MLK and pipeline opposition

The fossil fuel opposition is the child and grandchild of Mohandas K. Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. With their nonviolence, truth, and action as a model, we shall overcome.

Bill McKibben, The Guardian, 25 August 2011, Martin Luther King’s legacy and the power of nonviolent civil disobedience: In opposing the Keystone XL oil pipeline, demonstrators are getting a sense of the civil rights leader’s courage,

Preacher, speaker, writer under fire, but also tactician. He really understood the power of nonviolence, a power we’ve experienced in the last few days. When the police cracked down on us, the publicity it produced cemented two of the main purposes of our protest: First, it made Keystone XL “ the new, 1,700-mile-long pipeline we’re trying to block that will vastly increase the flow of “dirty” tar sands oil from Alberta, Canada, to the Gulf of Mexico “ into a national issue. A few months ago, it was mainly people along the route of the prospective pipeline who were organising against it. (And with good reason: Continue reading →