The Peakist

NewScientist.com news service
Rachel Nowak, Melbourne

The largest carbon burial experiment in the world began in earnest on Thursday when the drilling of a 2100-metre well began in the Otway Basin, on the coast of southern Australia. The project promised the most comprehensive monitoring for leaks to date. (more…)

by David S. Elliott

Decline of the world’s largest reserve could cripple the global economy.

Back in 2001, before the issue of energy scarcity ever entered my mind, I read a chilling online article called Ghawar Is Dying that bluntly speculated about the massive global upheavals modern industrial society would suffer if the largest oil field in Saudi Arabia were indeed running dry.

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Yes, really. The BBC have launched an online game based roughly on IPCC models where you are president of the European Nations. You must tackle climate change and stay popular enough with the voters to remain in office.

Climate Challenge 

It’s rare that an opinion is expressed so contrary to one’s own received wisdom by someone of such authority that you just can’t ignore it. So when James Hansen, Director and lead climate scientist of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Science says that the remaining oil and gas can be burnt whilst limiting atmospheric CO2 to ~450ppm and incremental temperature increase to only 1°C, it stopped me in my tracks. Hansen famously accused the Bush administration of trying to silence him after calling for prompt reductions in emissions of greenhouse gases in 2005 and stated last year, in the context of reporting the results of NASA studies on arctic sea ice loss, ““We have a very brief window of opportunity to deal with climate change – no longer than decade at most” (more…)

By: Elliot H. Gue

Earnings season is a busy time for the stock market. And the January/February season–when most companies report fourth quarter results–is the busiest of them all. That’s because companies typically offer a look at the year ahead, shedding some light on new themes to consider.
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Does substantial mitigation of climate change, absent global economic collapse, presuppose social revolution? Is a global economic collapse resulting from oil and gas depletion the most likely scenario for substantial mitigation of climate change?

I find it difficult to articulate my political desires (for systemic socio-economic transformation) with the foreshortened timescale we are presented with within which to substantially mitigate climate change. I am wary that climate change can become the vehicle for political desires (my own included) such that realistic options may be rejected on ideological grounds - or to put it another way that the profound potential for climate change to act a vehicle for social transformation becomes an ideologically driven focus above and beyond the objective conditions of climate change. An illustration of the problem… (more…)