Oilmen in troubled waters.
For a bearer of bad news, an oil industry conference is less of a lion's than it was. But some of the speakers still have strong ostrich tendencies.
An unseasonably steamy Vienna. A vast petroleum engineering conference in Opec's home city. These days, the oil and gas industry cannot gather without at least some effort to talk about climate change, and I had long ago accepted an invitation to speak, forgetting that just because you put something in the diary months in advance it does not mean that you will be any less preoccupied come the day.
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Chase those footballs
The spirit of the Somme in the age of global warming
On the first day of July ninety days ago, one of the first units of British troops to go over the top on the first day of the Battle of the Somme did so chasing footballs they had kicked towards the German trenches. Within minutes most of the men in that unit, and thousands of others, were killed by withering machine gun fire. By the end of the first day, 20,000 had died, the worst loss ever by a British army in a day of war. By the end of the fruitless battle, four months later, a quarter of a million men had died in a few square miles of mud.
For what? What spirit in men is it that allows such carnage? To plan it, to participate in it, to tolerate it after the event.
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San Francisco, microcosm of the world. Solarcentury, microcosm of hope.
I write these thoughts with skyscrapers reaching into clouds around me, in a city that is doomed. A geological fault that rips through the entire outer shell of the planet passes in a straight line right through San Francisco. This geological phenomenon, the San Andreas Fault, has been undisturbed by earthquakes for a century. That sounds good, but is in fact awful. Faults like this, which are common around the Pacific Ocean, normally release their stress via many tiny earthquakes. Not this one. It is locked. But only temporarily. Over geological time it builds stress steadily until a periodic big release. The last release came in 1906, generating one of the most destructive earthquakes ever seen. The bits of the city not destroyed by the earthquake were polished off by the fires that followed it. The periods between the releases of stress on the fault tend to be around a hundred years.
The good citizens of San Francisco know about the imminence and inevitability of the...