Anjli Raval, , - Financial Times (U.K.)
Stephan: Few people seem to know the truth about oil reserves. This is the data, and it makes it easy to see why carbon interests in the U.S. are so powerful.
Credit: Dreamstime
The US holds more oil reserves than Saudi Arabia and Russia, the first time it has surpassed those held by the world’s biggest exporting nations, according to a new study.
Rystad Energy estimates recoverable oil in the US from existing fields, discoveries and yet undiscovered areas amounts to 264bn barrels. The figure surpasses Saudi Arabia’s 212bn and Russia’s 256bn in reserves.
The analysis of 60,000 fields worldwide, conducted over a three-year period by the Oslo-based group, shows total global oil reserves at 2.1tn barrels. This is 70 times the current production rate of about 30bn barrels of crude oil a year, Rystad Energy said on Monday.
Production outlook depends on a series of holes in the ground
Recoverable reserves — those barrels that are technologically and economically feasible to extract — are analysed by the energy industry to determine company valuations and the long-term health of […]
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Stephan: Here is what corruption looks like.
It’s one of the highest-stakes debates in the battle over climate change policy action: How much methane is spewing from oil and gas sites nationwide, and what do we do as a result? If enough of the odorless, colorless methane gas leaks or is vented into the air, scientists say, then burning natural gas — marketed as a green fuel that can help wean the U.S. off of high-carbon fuels — will actually be worse for the climate than coal, long seen as the fuel that contributes the most to global warming.
Recently, over 100 community and environmental groups sent a letter urging the Environmental Protection Agency’s internal watchdog to investigate claims that a top methane researcher had committed scientific fraud and charging that he had made false and misleading statements to the press in response to those claims.
In June, NC WARN, an environmental group, presented the EPA Inspector General with evidence it said showed that key research on methane leaks was tainted, and that one of the EPA’s top scientific advisors fraudulently concealed evidence that a commonly-used tool for collecting data from oil and gas wells gives artificially low methane measurements.
The 68-page complaint dated June 8 laid out evidence that David Allen, a professor […]
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His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama of Tibet, - Dalai Lama.com
Stephan: The Dalai Lama is perhaps the most respected religious figure in the world. He has been a leader for decades and, so far as I know, completely free of scandal, and utterly consistent in his views that the function of society is to produce wellness, and that war is ultimately a solution for nothing. I particularly like his analogy that war is like a fire in which the kindling is humans, and his perceptions on appeasement.
The 14th Dalai Lama of Tibet
Of course, war and the large military establishments are the greatest sources of violence in the world. Whether their purpose is defensive or offensive, these vast powerful organizations exist solely to kill human beings. We should think carefully about the reality of war. Most of us have been conditioned to regard military combat as exciting and glamorous – an opportunity for men to prove their competence and courage. Since armies are legal, we feel that war is acceptable; in general, nobody feels that war is criminal or that accepting it is criminal attitude. In fact, we have been brainwashed. War is neither glamorous nor attractive. It is monstrous. Its very nature is one of tragedy and suffering.
War is like a fire in the human community, one whose fuel is living beings. I find this analogy especially appropriate and useful. Modern warfare waged primarily with different forms of fire, but we are so conditioned to see it as thrilling that we talk about this or […]
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Derek Markham, - treehugger
Stephan: Here is some excellent news describing where I see electric vehicles going. The transition out of the carbon era is picking up momentum day-by-day.
Hanergy electric self-charging car
Credit: Hanergy
In just a few years, we could see an electric car on the market that doesn’t need a charging station to ‘fuel up.’
The biggest apparent stumbling blocks for electric vehicles (EVs) seems to be their range – the distance that can be driven between charging – and the time it takes for an EV battery to be charged. When competing against gas cars, which can be filled up in just a few minutes, and can cover a range of several hundred miles per tank, the idea of having a limited range and a longer ‘fueling’ time with an EV isn’t one that most of us are comfortable with. And when considering the easy availability of fuel from the vast number of gas stations (as opposed to the EV charging stations that are few and far between in most areas), switching from gas to electric mobility is a bit of a stretch for many people (not even taking into account the higher cost for EVs).
However, […]
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Stephan: This is why scientific findings are conditional until sufficient replications make it clear a finding is correct.
fMRI scans
Credit: Shutterstock
There could be a very serious problem with the past 15 years of research into human brain activity, with a new study suggesting that a bug in fMRI software could invalidate the results of some 40,000 papers.
That’s massive, because functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is one of the best tools we have to measure brain activity, and if it’s flawed, it means all those conclusions about what our brains look like during things like exercise, gaming, love, and drug addiction are wrong.
“Despite the popularity of fMRI as a tool for studying brain function, the statistical methods used have rarely been validated using real data,” researchers led by Anders Eklund from Linköping University in Sweden
assert.The main problem here is in how scientists use fMRI scans to find sparks of activity in certain regions of the brain. During an experiment, a participant will be asked to perform a certain task, while a massive magnetic field pulsates through their […]
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