PowerSwitch

Now, I think I have come across Richard Pike before. You might think being at the RSC he is career scientist, in fact he is a career oil and gas man. Here is what he says about oil reserves : The cover story "A World Without Oil" omitted significant oil reserves: oil shale in eight countri...

Er..yes. Nice. But it ignores all the invisible energy imports. Who made the tractor shown being driven on biodesel? Where did the tinned sheet steel being used in the canning factory come from? Not from the island, obviously. You have to close the loop on an entire self contained economy before su...

Hawking's vision is truly universal, so to him planning for events occurring 4.5 billion years from now make sense. But there is no point taking his comments out of context. There are plenty more pressing threats to humans. Assuming we get through PO and GW, avian flu pandemic, address the many envi...

search the web for "rainwater harvesting". Untreated rain water is not safe to drink. Why? See SherryMayo's post above. I'd quite happily stick a cup outside my back door when its raining with some improvised collection funnel above it and drink the rainwater thus collected without any tr...

the most recent monthy figure (an average of EIA and IEA data) gives a production rate of over 85MB/D Contrary to Kens rear view mirror prediction, we did not pass the global peak of oil production on December 16th, 2005. You make it sound like Ken is wrong by some huge margin. In fact the new peak...

What do you guys think about the potential for an ecovillage based on a private island? ... Would something like this work? Has it been tried before? Historically, islands are not very sustainable places. I think you would need a significantly larger island in an optimum location to have any real c...

It is hardly surprising that the UK government gets its info from the IEA: this is exactly what the IEA is for , i.e. to advise member countries on energy issues. I would not expect our government to get info on climate change from Greenpeace, the Centre for Policy Studies, nor some group I never he...

Yeah, it is a pity that Ruppert is not completely sane. He seems to work on the "keep predicting disasters until you get lucky" principle, while banking on supporters forgetting his many failed predictions. I noticed he has backtracked on saying that Katrina/Rita "will cause the colla...

It's not great... maybe someone else could add something? Hmm, perhaps "complete rubbish" is not very diplomatic - even if true! Thing is, journalists, even specialised ones, are not really instigators of data. So they are going to take the offical US forecasts. If they use different ones...

Paul Mason has published a guest piece about peak oil on his blog at http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/paulmason/2006/04/guestblog_will_high_oil_prices.html . He is inviting civilised debate! Mason seems to be one of the more perceptive reporters on Newsnight. One of the really interesting developments ove...