Oil is back near $100. Some pundits are saying it's because capital is being diverted from the various collapsing funds into commodities, which I can well believe. However, we all know what the overall trend is.
Here's a good recent summary of the situation.
An interesting article on the impacts of biofuels got me thinking about how we can better assess for ourselves the merits (or otherwise) of these various schemes. It seems to me that we need to develop a sort of environmental "common sense" that allows us to quickly judge the merits of particularly alternative energy sources, since by the reckoning of some commentators it may be the next bubble.
One useful approach is to think about the knock-on effects of any proposed scheme. Many such schemes are based on the concept of using an existing waste stream from some process, e.g., wood waste from the forestry industry, used fish and chip oil, etc. Implicit in this is that the waste stream would truly have been wasted, i.e., disappeared from the resource pool, if it hadn't been put to this use. The truth is that forestry waste will already be used somewhere, either to rebuild soil fertility in the forest itself or composted and used in some other agricultural process. Used chip oil, I don't know, but I'm betting it didn't just go into a hole in the ground.
The only true waste streams I can think of at the moment are nuclear waste and plastic shopping bags (not even sure about the latter). So, by using a supposed waste stream we are probably taking a resource from some other process. No such thing as a free lunch.
Equally, using land to grow anything is going to take away it's existing use, and there's very little (probably no) arable land on the planet that isn't being used for something. Even if it's not us that's using it but some other species that have as much right to live here (on Earth) as we have.
Oil's up above $130, and the mainstream media is starting to get worried:
One theory is that, as the price increases, we'll reach a pain point where demand will reduce sufficiently to drop the price. This assumes two things:
The problem with oil is that it is not a non-essential good. We may be able to curtail some of our discretionary travel, combine trips, car pool, etc., but transport energy is just one of the uses of oil. The primary use that we simply cannot cut back on is food production. The other problem with simply cutting back our demand to a previous level is that supply is not simply going to stop increasing - it's going to start rapidly decreasing. So, rather than the solution to the problem of high oil prices being a one-off exercise in reducing consumption, we need to develop a culture of reducing consumption every year.
So, picture a scenario where we helpfully turn our lightbulbs off for an hour and instead of getting a pat on the head and returning to business as usual, we just get asked to save more energy, and keep on doing it - forever.
