Reading Increasing Oil Production in the U.S. Sparks Less OPEC Reliance (The Daily Beast), above, there's this:

And that means the U.S. needs to import less oil—especially from OPEC countires. Numbers from the EIA report show that only 11 percent of the oil the U.S. used in March came from sources outside the U.S.

The citation link for this position says:

The U.S. met 89 percent of its own energy needs in March, the highest monthly rate since April 1986, EIA data show. Net imports of crude oil and petroleum products will fall to 5.7 million barrels a day by 2014, down from 12.5 million in 2005, the EIA said yesterday in its Short-Term Energy Outlook.
[fuelfix.com, July 11]

[bolds mine]

Conflating oil consumption with total energy use is, of course, misleading at best, though I call Liar, Liar, Pants on fire!

Are we sure we want to silence TOD?

BTW: The Beast article is open for comments. Anyone have an account there who can counter this idiocy?

Extending an offer, but tendering thanks first.

Like many, I have been a long-time reader of TOD and I received a fantastic education here. I am quite sorry to see it go because it was a fantastic, peerless, resource and because of the highly intelligent and thoughtful community gathered here.

As an operator of a website I know that it really has to be a full time job to be done well, and the TOD staff have impeccable standards. Kudos for managing it all these years on a volunteer basis. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

And now the offer; The staff of Peak Prosperity dot com would be willing to stand up and host an oil drum like site to run new content, a drumbeat, and support comments. We have moderation in place, a good spam filter that works pretty well, and a very stable platform in which we have invested quite a lot over the years.

Our interests lie in advancing the general conversation about the ways in which humanity is leading an unsustainable existence, and we do this by linking energy, the economy and environment because none can be considered in isolation anymore. To have a deep conversation continuing to run on the energy front is very central to our mission and now that TOD is going away we are quite motivated to assist if possible.

Our standards for content, and the quality and tenor of on-line conversations are very high and I am confident that we could take our existing platform, spin off a chunk of it with the appropriate functions to support this community, and do it relatively rapidly and cheaply.

At any rate, there would be a lot of considerations to cover in some detail and before I go there, I'm here to test the waters to see what sort of interest there might be in this idea?

Hurricane evacuation maps updated on East, Gulf coasts

What's different now? The new hurricane evacuation zones use information from a recently updated computer model the hurricane center developed that accounts for larger and slower-moving storms, according to New York's office of emergency management.

New York City's new evacuation zones, for instance, broaden the areas to be evacuated to include a total of 2.9 million people, 37% of the city's population, an increase from the 29% who were in the previous evacuation zones. "There are 600,000 people in an evacuation zone now that weren't before," says Christopher Miller of the city's office of emergency management.

Saudi Arabia 'targeting Iran and Israel with ballistic missiles'

Images analysed by experts at IHS Jane's Intelligence Review has revealed a hitherto undisclosed surface-to-surface missile base deep in the Saudi desert, with capabilities for hitting both countries.

Analysts who examined the photos spotted two launch pads with markings pointing north-west towards Tel Aviv and north-east towards Tehran. They are designed for Saudi Arabia's arsenal of lorry-launched DF 3 missiles, which have a range of 1,500-2,500 miles and can carry a two-ton payload.

The base, believed to have been built within the last five years, gives an insight into Saudi strategic thinking at a time of heightened tensions in the Gulf.

Climate change realism requires lifting veil of denial

The human psyche isn’t well-equipped, some researchers argue, to conceptualize and digest the catastrophic changes on the horizon. The overwhelming evidence that things are rapidly changing for the worse is, evidently, so painful it inspires enough feelings of guilt and fear that we unconsciously prop up some pretty effective defence mechanisms.

“There are emotions that are really disturbing that come up with climate change,” says University of Oregon sociology professor Kari Marie Norgaard, author of Living in Denial: Climate Change, Emotions, and Everyday Life, in a Skype interview with the Straight. “So I focus on three emotions: guilt, helplessness, and fear about the future. Psychological theory says that people don’t want to experience them. And we have all kinds of ways to normalize that.”

Collectively awakening to the projections of climate disruption is the first step to effectively tackling them, and it’s also what an emotionally secure and honest species should be fearless enough to do.

Putting People over Profits: The Fight Against Fracking

A joint University of Michigan/Muhlenberg College study reveals that only 49 percent of Pennsylvanians support shale gas extraction and 58 percent of all Pennsylvanians want the state to order “time out” until the health and environmental effects of fracking can be fully analyzed. That same study revealed that 60 percent of Pennsylvanians believe fracking poses a major risk to ground water resources, only 28 percent disagree; 12 percent have no opinion.

Petitions with more than 100,000 signatures requesting a moratorium were delivered to Gov. Tom Corbett in April. As is typical for the man who willingly accepted more than $1.8 million in campaign contributions from the oil and gas industry, it didn’t matter.

Surveillance Surge on the Border: Creating a Military-Industrial-Immigration Complex: How to Turn the U.S.-Mexican Border into a War Zone

… sometimes you just have to change the label on the package to suddenly find reality staring you in the face. Call it “immigration reform” and it looks like you’re dealing with enormous numbers of human beings in this country illegally. Think of it as “surveillance reform” and you’ll see that, as Miller points out, we’re using our borderlands and those undocumented migrants as an excuse to build, experiment with, and test out a new kind of surveillance state, drones included. And count on it, too: one of these days, maybe tomorrow, some version of that surveillance state will make it to your hometown, no matter how far you are from any border.

Mary Schiavo's Twitter account has some tweets about the Dreamliner fire.

Originally she said it looked bad because the fire happened after the plane had been parked 8 hours. Then she said Boeing "lucked out this time" - the fire appeared to be closer to the galley than to the batteries. Apparently, the coffee pots in the galley are a common cause of airplane fires.

Hearings set as firm moves forward with Utah oil shale development

The push to develop Utah’s oil shale resources steps into a new phase this month as an Estonian firm seeks permission to build a 19.5-mile utility corridor from its project area in eastern Uintah County to a power plant and an existing oil pipeline.

Canada's 2nd Largest Fire on Record Spreading Smoke to Europe

A massive fire burning in northern Quebec is Canada's second largest fire since fire records began in 1959, according to the Canadian Forest Service. The fire was more than twice the size of Rhode Island on Tuesday--1,621,000 acres. Called the Eastmain fire, the near-record blaze was ignited by lightning on May 25, and was burning along a 100-km front near the east shore of James Bay by the village of Eastmain. At times, the fire spread at 19 mph (30 kph). The fire cut power to Montreal's subway system and to 10% of the population of Quebec (500,000 customers) on July 4, when smoke from the fire ionized the air by key hydroelectric power lines, causing a cascade failure.

Russians to deploy floating nuclear power plant

—The general director of one of Russia's largest shipbuilders, Aleksandr Voznesensky, has announced to reporters that a floating nuclear power plant is currently under construction at one of Russia's ship yards. He added that it will likely be ready for use by 2016. The Russians are calling it a "floating power" station, abbreviated to PEB. The vessel has been given the name Akademik Lomonosov.

Lomonosov noted that nuclear powered marine vessels have a proven safety record going back 50 years [... if you ignore those nuclear subs that went critical and sank]

Lomonosov said that plans are underway to build a fleet of the floating platforms to provide cities and towns across Russia with electricity for general use and more specifically for heating homes and businesses. The Akademik Lomonosov will be capable of generating 70 MW of electricity—enough to power a city of 200,000 people. He noted also that such vessels could also be used to power desalination plants, providing 240,000 cubic meters of fresh water daily.

Further destabilisation in the Middle East possible according to new report

'The Remaking of Syria, Iraq and the Wider Middle East' report suggests that important as events in Cairo are, they distract Western attention from the much bigger game being played out in Syria which significantly risks changing the Levant after a century of relative territorial stability. Professor Stansfield who is also an RUSI's senior associate fellow analysed the impact the Syrian civil war could have on the future of the Middle East state system across the Levant.

The report warns that ongoing conflict may prompt the fragmentation of the region's twentieth-century defined states. Professor Stansfield outlines how Lebanon, Jordan –and the interests of Israel and Turkey – could all be profoundly affected; but the most important casualty of the war is potentially Iraq, with inter-communal conflicts driven by deeply held and murderous sectarian hatreds that continue to stalk its political landscape today.

'There seems to be growing regional and international acceptance of the possibility of erasing the once-rarefied, externally imposed boundaries that have divided peoples as much as they have united them, with greater emphasis on the need for state structures to be tied more authentically to the peoples they encompass.'

Study: Agents like Snowden prone to irrational decision making

U.S. intelligence agents – like the embattled Edward Snowden – are more prone to irrational inconsistencies in decision making when compared to college students and post-college adults. That's according a new Cornell University study to be published in an upcoming issue of the journal Psychological Science.

The study found intelligence agents exhibited larger biases on 30 gain-loss framing decisions, and were also more confident in those decisions. Thirty-six agents were recruited for the study from an anonymous federal agency, and were presented with scenarios ...

The results showed agents treated equivalent outcomes differently based on superficial wording. They were more willing than college students to take risks with human lives when outcomes were framed as losses.

These results shed light on the decision-making mechanisms of intelligence agents who identify and mitigate risks to national security, said Valerie Reyna, Cornell professor of human development and psychology, and lead author of the study. Like some other laboratory gambling tasks, framing effects have been shown to predict real-world behavior, Reyna added.

… so do bankers

Flying a kite for aerial wind power

… "With a 25 square metre sail like that we can produce enough energy to cover the needs of 40 households, with less [environmental] impact than a conventional windmill and at reduced costs," says Roland Schmehl at TU Delft.

Kite wind generation overcomes the problem of intermittent power, typical of conventional wind technologies, for one simple reason: the higher you go, the more constantly the wind blows. Airborne wind turbines provide a more stable energy flow, and they are much cheaper as they need less material than a wind turbine. Instead of a steel tower, you have a system that looks and works like a yo-yo.

Radioactivity found in Swiss lake near nuclear plant

Scientists have discovered a radioactive substance in sediment under a Swiss lake used for drinking water and situated near a nuclear plant, the Le Matin Dimanche weekly reported Sunday.

The plant is believed to have caused a spike in cesium 137 found in the sediment of Lake Biel and dating back to 2000 through the discharge of contaminated waste water into the Aar river that feeds into the lake, about 20 kilometres (12 miles) downstream, the weekly reported.

The Muehleberg plant, which came online in 1972, is 17 kilometres (11 miles) west of the Swiss capital Bern.

Australia to scrap carbon tax for trading scheme

Key greenhouse gas emitter Australia on Sunday announced it will scrap its carbon tax in favour of an emissions trading scheme that puts a limit on pollution from 2014, a year earlier than planned.

Bowen confirmed media reports that the fixed Aus$24.15 ($21.90) per tonne carbon tax would be dumped in favour of a floating price of between Aus$6 and Aus$10 per tonne from July 1, 2014, to ease cost of living pressures for families and help support the non-mining sectors of the economy.

With national elections later this year, Labor is hoping the change will see a drop in soaring electricity prices.

Egypt wheat figures appear half baked

Bread - or rather figures accurately depicting how much of Egypt's food staple will be available this year - appears to be the latest victim of the country’s political crisis.

… according to experts, the government of recently ousted president Mohamed Morsi has repeatedly given false figures on how much of the commodity the world’s biggest wheat importer really has.

Late on Wednesday, a week after the military ousted Morsi and members of his government from power, former Minister of Supplies Bassem Ouda told Reuters news agency that the country’s wheat stock may run dry in two months.

According to Ouda, Egypt, the world's biggest wheat importer, has about 500,000 metric tons of wheat to meet the demands of 84 million people. World Bank figures for 2012 show the country is expected to consume about 18 million metric tons of wheat in 2013.

"Up till last year, local farmers could annually provide 2.5 million metric tons," Aboul-Dahab said. "So when the outgoing ministry said they will raise that to 4.5 million, it sounded hard to achieve, but perhaps manageable. But then they pushed the figure to 9.5 million metric tons, which was just ridiculously impossible.

… According to a recently released report by the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), the Egyptian government has forecasted wheat procurement at 4 to 5 million metric tons, which "appears unrealistic".

"A more realistic figure for procurement of Egyptian wheat is 3.0 to 3.2 million metric tons in 2013/2014," the report said.

With foreign debt piling up and no signs of an economic recovery, a request by Morsi during an April visit to Moscow, Russia for wheat supplies was turned down by President Vladimir Putin.

… Meanwhile, Egyptians are expressing more and more frustration at the prospect of bread shortages.

"Even bread is politicised? They [governments] politicised freedoms, rights, even religion, and they'll soon politicise the air we breathe and the water we drink," said Sanaa Abdel-Hamid, a housewife and mother of four as she walked away from the bakery with her bread supply.

Models point to rapid sea-level rise from climate change

Sea levels could rise by 2.3 metres for each degree celsius that global temperatures increase and they will remain high for centuries to come, according to a new study by the leading climate research institute.

Anders Levermann said his study for the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research was the first to examine evidence from climate history and combine it with computer simulations of contributing factors to long-term sea-level increases: thermal expansion of oceans, the melting of mountain glaciers and the melting of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets.

Massive içe sheets melting at rate of 300 billion tons per year, climate satellite shows

5 Companies That Brought Down Peak Oil

Peak Oil is dead -- or at least the website dedicated to educating the world on the theory is, as the popular Oil Drum website will cease publishing new content at end of the month. The theory just doesn't seem to have much relevance these days, when North America is in the midst of a massive energy production boom. While we are a long way from celebrating Energy Independence Day, we've at least pushed back the date when Peak Oil will again become a major topic of conversation. With that as context, let's look at five of the companies that have made Peak Oil no longer relevant. …

Alaska set for vote on oil-tax cut after lobby group submits petition

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (Reuters) - Critics of an oil-industry tax cut handed a petition with 50,000 signatures to Alaska state officials on Saturday, more than enough to force a referendum that would overturn a new oil tax law.

Governor Sean Parnell, sponsor of the new tax, argued that steep cuts in oil taxes were needed to lure industry investment away from North Dakota and other booming oil-producing areas. He dubbed the bill the "More Alaska Production Act".

Opponents say the tax cuts are too steep, will cost the state $4.5 billion in lost revenues over five years, and do nothing to reverse North Slope production declines that they say are inevitable as the area's main oil fields age.

Kuwait sends $200 million worth of oil to Egypt: newspaper

Kuwait has sent two oil tankers carrying crude and diesel worth $200 million to Egypt, a Kuwaiti newspaper said on Sunday, part of a $4 billion aid package pledged by the Gulf Arab state last week after the ouster of Islamist President Mohamed Mursi.

Kuwait last week joined other oil-producing Gulf states in pledging a massive aid package worth $12 billion to Egypt in a show of support after the army toppled the Muslim Brotherhood government. Most U.S.-allied Gulf monarchies regard the Brotherhood as a threat.

Hollande vows no shale gas exploration while he is president

President Francois Hollande said on Sunday that France would maintain its ban on the exploration for shale gas throughout his five-year term.

"As long as I am president, there were will be no exploration for shale gas," Hollande said during a Bastille Day interview with top television channels.

He said the fracking technique used to extract shale gas presented too many "risks to groundwater".

"We can see some consequences in the United States" from the technique, Hollande said.

http://enenews.com/fox-news-outrage-after-radioactive-cesium-found-in-la...

Scientists have discovered a radioactive substance in sediment under a Swiss lake used for drinking water and situated near a nuclear plant [Muehleberg, 11 miles west of the nation's capital], the Le Matin Dimanche weekly reported Sunday. [...]

The plant is believed to have caused a spike in cesium 137 found in the sediment of Lake Biel and dating back to 2000 through the discharge of contaminated waste water [...]

“No one ever told me that there were abnormally high concentrations in the lake,” Hans Stoekli, who served as Biel mayor from 1990 to 2010 [...]

If you don't test, you don't know...do ya?

[Apparently what happens in the ME is now and always has been "basically" about oil, so maybe this isn't too OT.]

For any who may have followed Riverbend's journal until she last posted from Syria, she has "surfaced" and posted a really good essay, in April, on the 10th anniversary of the Entry of the Americans Into Baghdad. (cue Wagner?) The archive of her journal postings is very interesting reading, for those who never did -- on-the-ground, semi-real-time reporting on what it was like to live in Baghdad between the invasion and when she and her family left for Syria in 2007, and one or two posts from Damascus about what being a refugee in Syria was like.

http://riverbendblog.blogspot.com/

There is an entry at the Wiki about her, as well. She was only 23 when the U.S. invaded Baghdad.

http://riverbendblog.blogspot.com/

Supporting Online Information for Peak oil demand. The role of fuel efficiency and alternative fuels in a global oil production decline Published in Environmental …
AR Brandt, A Millard-Ball, M Ganser - pangea.stanford.edu
9 days ago - This supplementary information document contains additional methods
discussion not included in the main paper. This includes additional Materials and Methods
(Sections S1-‐S12) sections, additional figures (Figures S1-‐S19), and additional tables,

https://pangea.stanford.edu/researchgroups/eao/sites/default/files/IDES_...

This was discussed in Drumbeat a few days ago, but the main paper is behind a paywall--so someone might find this supplementary material useful.