Shell Oil gets more than they bargained for when slick pranksters invade their Science Slam

from our friend Richard Metzger at Dangerous Minds

The Burson-Marsteller public relations firm held a “Science Slam” event in Berlin yesterday to try to burnish the reputation of their client—I believe the industry term is “greenwash”—the Shell oil company. A “Science Slam” is like a rap battle or poetry slam meets a TED talk. Presenters make—or try to make—entertaining oral presentations of their scientific concepts, inventions or advocacy, and then the audience chooses the winner. Shell can do things like this or sponsor an “Eco Race” with all electric cars or some bullshit like that and then pretend like they give a fuck about the environment.

Several of the presenters directly challenged Shell’s ethics in their presentations and a freestyle rapper offered up a spontaneous rhyming diss of the Dutch oil giant. Environmental disasters and climate change were apparently the main topics, but at the end, two “young scientists” brought out a machine they informed the audience was a CO2 recovery experiment. Once fired up, the machine sprayed black oil sludge all over the stage.

No word what the half trillion dollar oil company made of this debacle, but the audience members voted these oily pranksters—two members of the subversive activist group the Peng! Collective—as the winners. Then the contest was promplty cancelled!

 

Via Nerdcore

Eco-Filmmaker Breathes Sigh Of Relief As Big Oil Has Little Setback

from Ecorazzi

If there is any good that has emerged from the Gulf oil spill, perhaps it’s the harsh reality that our addiction to fossil fuel comes with a laundry list of environmental consequences that we are finally beginning to grasp.

We can no longer justify, turn a blind eye or reserve our energy concerns for a rainy day because with each day that passes, new eco-system casualties are being documented…and if you’ve seen any of the photos, it’s an absolutely heart-wrenching scene out there.

That’s why the latest news about documentary filmmaker Joe Berlinger’s mini-success in court is so timely.

Following the release of his 2009 movie CRUDE – which documents the continuing saga of Equadorian natives who say that oil giant Chevron decimated the Amazon jungle and the health of their people during the company’s 30 year Lago Agrio oil field exploration – just last month, the deep pocketed corporation somehow managed to get a federal judge to order Berlinger to hand over more than 600 hours of leftover documentary footage.

Chevron was hoping that by combing through the documentarian’s scads of videotape, they might be able to conjure up some sort of misconduct or fraudulent evidence that could enable them to say buh-bye to the hefty $27 billion class action lawsuit that has been haunting them for well over one year.

Bear in mind that this has been a painfully drawn out case with many twists and turns, so being cautiously optimistic about team Berlinger, while nice, might be somewhat naïve.

A full hearing will occur in July, at which time “the appellate court could decide to merely narrow the scope of the subpoena” and order that Berlinger hand over the footage anyway.

Fingers crossed that at least ONE oil company gets their head served to them on a big fat bank-account-busting platter.

History Of The Electric Car

from Automoblog

As the turning world melts about us, natural disasters turn up to 11 and an estimated five thousand barrels of crude oil blast into the Gulf of Mexico each day, America’s cry for electric cars has never been louder. Electric cars aren’t new. When the internal combustion engine was in its infancy and, like an infant, was only capable of crapping out, the most reliable horseless carriages were powered by electric motors. As gas prices fell and the internal combustion engine became more reliable, electric cars were cast aside with the rest of the old timey garbage — like busted suspenders and empty jars of Dr. McSomebody’s Mystery Mustache Wax.

Take a look at the graphic below for a full history of the electric car, from the 19th Century EVs you’ve never heard of, to the future concepts you might be driving next year.

Click on the image for a full-res, readable version:

As an overview, the electric car came back in the middle of the 20th century, languishing in the hands of small companies run by patchouli idealists who honestly thought minuscule cars with cripplingly ugly body lines were the wave of the future. And the crickets chirped for many years.

At the end of the 20th century, major auto manufacturers gave the electric car a few sideways glances. Most notably, General Motors gave the electric car a half-serious test run from 1996 to 2002 with the EV1. Eight hundred cars were produced and were available through special lease programs in select U.S. cities. In 2002 the EV1 program was canceled and all road going EV1s were repossessed and either crushed or disabled. Around the same time, Toyota’s Prius began its rise to power and major manufacturers the world over were clamoring to jump on the Hybrid band wagon. A hybrid Ferrari, really?

Things are changing on the electric car scene. Technology is advancing and world governments are taking alternative transportation energy sources seriously. Ironically enough the best of the fully electric cars today is built by a small company. The Tesla Roadster has a lot in common with the Lotus Elise and its performance figures, as well as its range, are the best anyone has achieved with a fully electric vehicle thus far. But we’ve still got a long way to go, baby.

Imagining Life Without Oil, and Being Ready (NYT)

from the New York Times:

As oil continued to pour into the Gulf of Mexico on a recent Saturday, Jennifer Wilkerson spent three hours on the phone talking about life after petroleum.

For Mrs. Wilkerson, 33, a moderate Democrat from Oakton, Va., who designs computer interfaces, the spill reinforced what she had been obsessing over for more than a year — that oil use was outstripping the world’s supply. She worried about what would come after: maybe food shortages, a collapse of the economy, a breakdown of civil order. Her call was part of a telephone course about how to live through it all.

In bleak times, there is a boom in doom.

Americans have long been fascinated by disaster scenarios, from the population explosion to the cold war to global warming. These days the doomers, as Mrs. Wilkerson jokingly calls herself and likeminded others, have a new focus: peak oil. They argue that oil supplies peaked as early as 2008 and will decline rapidly, taking the economy with them.

Located somewhere between the environmental movement and the bunkered survivalists, the peak oil crowd is small but growing, reaching from health food stores to Congress, where a Democrat and a Republican formed a Congressional Peak Oil Caucus.

And they have been resourceful, sharing the concerns of other “collapsitarians,” including global debt and climate change — both caused by overuse of diminishing oil supplies, they maintain.

Many people dispute the peak oil hypothesis, including Daniel Yergin, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money and Power” and chairman of IHS Cambridge Energy Research Associates, a company that advises governments and industry. Mr. Yergin has argued that new technology continues to bring more oil.

Andre Angelantoni is not taking that chance. In his home in San Rafael, Calif., he has stocked food reserves in case an oil squeeze prevents food from reaching market and has converted his investments into gold and silver.

The effects of peak oil, including high energy prices, will not be gentle, said Mr. Angelantoni, a Web designer whose company, Post Peak Living, offers the telephone class and a handful of online courses for life after a collapse.

“Our whole economy depends on greater and greater energy supplies, and that just isn’t possible,” he said. “I wish I could say we’ll quietly accept having many millions of people unemployed, their homes foreclosed. But it’s hard to see the whole country transitioning to a low-energy future without people becoming angry. There’s going to be quite a bit of social turmoil on the way down.”

Transition US, a British transplant that seeks to help towns brace for life after oil, including a “population die-off” from shortages of oil, food and medicine, now has 68 official chapters around the country, since starting with just two in 2008. Group projects range from community vegetable gardens to creating local currency in case the national one crashes.

Bleak books like James Howard Kunstler’s “The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of Oil, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century” and Richard Heinberg’s “The Party’s Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies” have sold 100,000 and 50,000 copies, respectively, according to their publishers.

In Congress in 2005, Representative Roscoe G. Bartlett, Republican of Maryland, and Senator Tom Udall, a New Mexico Democrat who was a representative at the time, created the Congressional Peak Oil Caucus. Web sites, online videos and numerous social networks connect adherents in ways that would once have been impossible.

Mr. Angelantoni, 40, came to his concern about peak oil from an interest in climate change, because he felt its impact would be more precipitous. “The peak oil conversation is where the climate change conversation was 20 years ago,” he said. He distinguished the peak oil crowd from the environmental movement. “The Sierra Club tells people that if we use less energy, the underlying model is sound,” he said. “I don’t think that’s the case.”

Like several people in the telephone class, he said his concern with peak oil had strained his relationship with his spouse, creating an “unbridgeable” distance between them.

“It’s very difficult for people to hear that this form of the economy is breaking down,” he said. “They think that because it hasn’t happened yet that it won’t ever happen.”

Mrs. Wilkerson has now read two dozen books about peak oil and related topics. For a while, she became depressed at work and had trouble discussing her feelings with her husband because the conversations were so dire, she said. At work, her colleagues told her directly “that they were tired of hearing about it,” she said. “They felt I was going to an extreme, thinking collapse was going to happen.”

She added, “I was ready to move out to the country and be an organic farmer, but I learned that’s not the way to do it. You need a community.”

Despite the rapid growth of Transition US, the movement was much easier to sell in England, said Raven Gray, who came to this country to found a branch here. While Americans embrace doomsday scenarios, they are less likely to work together on how to live afterward, she said.

“There’s lot of apocalyptic people in environmental circles,” she said. “A lot of those people were outraged that we presented an optimistic view of the future. There’s a dark vision driving us, but we’re about moving toward a positive picture of what can be done.”

For Mrs. Wilkerson, who is now growing vegetables in her kitchen, the course, which cost $175, gave her encouragement to move in that direction.

“Whether or not collapse happens, being able to teach other people to grow food so they can weather any adversity is a good investment of my time,” she said.