Welcome ! As a young French Marketing professional with a Master's in International Management I have been selecting since January 2007 the latest headlines and best researches on sustainable development, climate change, cleantech and the world energy sector. Sounds great ? Don't hesitate to subscribe now !
Here is another post I wrote on Cleantechies : ” While I was visiting my family in the Region of Lorraine – North Eastern France – I came across two distinct news illustrating the possible future of the region, and in a way, of the whole country. ”
” The first one is about dirty polluting fossil energy as to Elixir Petroleum, an Australian company, there would be massive quantities of shale oil and gas in Lorraine’s soil. ”
As always with guest posts, to keep reading, please check out their website. I look forward to reading your comments and thoughts there.
You know probably know it : America – and to be fair, many other countires - is giving a lot of subsidies to Big Oil and companies that are making billions of profits. This doesn’t make sense economically nor environmentally.
You might also remember that I have been advocating changing this for years and have been thinking that this money should rather go to energy efficiency projets and / or renewables.
Similarly, looking for shale oil and gas and offshore drilling is just keeping us on the headlong rush. 350.org proposes us a nice infographics full of facts on these very matters. Please go and check it out !
In French, we have an expression, ” la fuite en avant “ which can be explained this way : “A fuite en avant is something one does when one is in a losing situation, and one hopes to salvage it by doing more of the same or worse.”
Not that I want to delve into linguistics… I am writing about this as the answer to our oil woes is not “more” but “less”. We are beyond the end of conventional oil. The International Energy Agency stated so.
What we are heading towards is unconventional and dirtier, even extreme oil. Think about the mess caused by oil shales… Continue »
This week the New York Times ran another great article on energy, this time on why natural gas may be worse than coal, regarding climate change. Until now, this energy source was said to be emitting half less than coal.
The implications of such a fact could be huge as the world wouldn’t be able to count on natural gas to be a bridging energy source. Indeed, even environmentalists were until recently advocating natural gas…
But is it really the case about natural gas in general or just specific types ? It turns that, like for oil, unconventional gas is more polluting that the traditional one. Continue »
While some magazines print sensationalist articles, some other prefer to carry out real research with real facts and figures. New Scientist indeed published an interesting article on what they call extreme – or unconventional – oil.
Understanding that peak oil is either near or already arrived we can either burn as much unconventional oil as we need or use it wisely to smooth the transition to the post-oil society.
The editorial is a little gem that will allow you to better understand the full article written by David Strahan, the author of The Last Oil Shock. Continue »
You think drilling for Arctic oil would be an ugly mess ? Then have a look at the exploitation of oil shales and tar-sands that is already occurring in Canada and the United States.
The WWF released a new report on how recovering these difficultly recoverable oil barrels are literally destroying entire regions with massive deforestation and large air and water pollution.
Oil is already the second most polluting energy source. With such practices it is becoming an even bigger problem. It is high time for these countries to work on efficiency. Continue »
