NewEnergyNews-Butterfield Archive

WALL STREET JOURNAL'S Environmental Capital quotes NewEnergyNews:

  • 06/05/2007
  • --------------------------- ---------------------------

    WALL STREET JOURNAL selects NewEnergyNews as one of the "Blogs We Are Reading" --

  • 05/14/2007
  • 04/16/2007
  • 03/28/2007
  • -------------------

      ---------------------------

      Anne B. Butterfield of DAILY CAMERA, a biweekly contributor to NewEnergyNews

      -------------------

    • My Novels: OIL IN THEIR BLOOD, The American Decades & OIL IN THEIR BLOOD, The Story of Our Addiction
    • Review of OIL IN THEIR BLOOD, The American Decades by Mark S. Friedman
    • OIL IN THEIR BLOOD, The American Decades, the second volume of Herman K. Trabish’s retelling of oil’s history in fiction, picks up where the first book in the series, OIL IN THEIR BLOOD, The Story of Our Addiction, left off. The new book is an engrossing, informative and entertaining tale of the Roaring 20s, World War II and the Cold War. You don’t have to know anything about the first historical fiction’s adventures set between the Civil War, when oil became a major commodity, and World War I, when it became a vital commodity, to enjoy this new chronicle of the U.S. emergence as a world superpower and a world oil power.
    • As the new book opens, Lefash, a minor character in the first book, witnesses the role Big Oil played in designing the post-Great War world at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919. Unjustly implicated in a murder perpetrated by Big Oil agents, LeFash takes the name Livingstone and flees to the U.S. to clear himself. Livingstone’s quest leads him through Babe Ruth’s New York City and Al Capone’s Chicago into oil boom Oklahoma. Stymied by oil and circumstance, Livingstone marries, has a son and eventually, surprisingly, resolves his grievances with the murderer and with oil.
    • In the new novel’s second episode the oil-and-auto-industry dynasty from the first book re-emerges in the charismatic person of Victoria Wade Bridger, “the woman everybody loved.” Victoria meets Saudi dynasty founder Ibn Saud, spies for the State Department in the Vichy embassy in Washington, D.C., and – for profound and moving personal reasons – accepts a mission into the heart of Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe. Underlying all Victoria’s travels is the struggle between the allies and axis for control of the crucial oil resources that drove World War II.
    • As the Cold War begins, the novel’s third episode recounts the historic 1951 moment when Britain’s MI-6 handed off its operations in Iran to the CIA, marking the end to Britain’s dark manipulations and the beginning of the same work by the CIA. But in Trabish’s telling, the covert overthrow of Mossadeq in favor of the ill-fated Shah becomes a compelling romance and a melodramatic homage to the iconic “Casablanca” of Bogart and Bergman.
    • Monty Livingstone, veteran of an oil field youth, European WWII combat and a star-crossed post-war Berlin affair with a Russian female soldier, comes to 1951 Iran working for a U.S. oil company. He re-encounters his lost Russian love, now a Soviet agent helping prop up Mossadeq and extend Mother Russia’s Iranian oil ambitions. The reunited lovers are caught in a web of political, religious and Cold War forces until oil and power merge to restore the Shah to his future fate. The romance ends satisfyingly, America and the Soviet Union are the only forces left on the world stage and ambiguity is resolved with the answer so many of Trabish’s characters ultimately turn to: Oil.
    • Commenting on a recent National Petroleum Council report calling for government subsidies of the fossil fuels industries, a distinguished scholar said, “It appears that the whole report buys these dubious arguments that the consumer of energy is somehow stupid about energy…” Trabish’s great and important accomplishment is that you cannot read his emotionally engaging and informative tall tales and remain that stupid energy consumer. With our world rushing headlong toward Peak Oil and epic climate change, the OIL IN THEIR BLOOD series is a timely service as well as a consummate literary performance.
    • Oil history journal articles by Dr. Trabish: Oil Stories and Histories
    • Review of OIL IN THEIR BLOOD, The Story of Our Addiction by Mark S. Friedman
    • "...ours is a culture of energy illiterates." (Paul Roberts, THE END OF OIL)
    • OIL IN THEIR BLOOD, a superb new historical fiction by Herman K. Trabish, addresses our energy illiteracy by putting the development of our addiction into a story about real people, giving readers a chance to think about how our addiction happened. Trabish's style is fine, straightforward storytelling and he tells his stories through his characters.
    • The book is the answer an oil family's matriarch gives to an interviewer who asks her to pass judgment on the industry. Like history itself, it is easier to tell stories about the oil industry than to judge it. She and Trabish let readers come to their own conclusions.
    • She begins by telling the story of her parents in post-Civil War western Pennsylvania, when oil became big business. This part of the story is like a John Ford western and its characters are classic American melodramatic heroes, heroines and villains.
    • In Part II, the matriarch tells the tragic story of the second generation and reveals how she came to be part of the tales. We see oil become an international commodity, traded on Wall Street and sought from London to Baku to Mesopotamia to Borneo. A baseball subplot compares the growth of the oil business to the growth of baseball, a fascinating reflection of our current president's personal career.
    • There is an unforgettable image near the center of the story: International oil entrepreneurs talk on a Baku street. This is Trabish at his best, portraying good men doing bad and bad men doing good, all laying plans for wealth and power in the muddy, oily alley of a tiny ancient town in the middle of everywhere. Because Part I was about triumphant American heroes, the tragedy here is entirely unexpected, despite Trabish's repeated allusions to other stories (Casey At The Bat, Hamlet) that do not end well.
    • In the final section, World War I looms. Baseball takes a back seat to early auto racing and oil-fueled modernity explodes. Love struggles with lust. A cavalry troop collides with an army truck. Here, Trabish has more than tragedy in mind. His lonely, confused young protagonist moves through the horrible destruction of the Romanian oilfields only to suffer worse and worse horrors, until--unexpectedly--he finds something, something a reviewer cannot reveal. Finally, the question of oil must be settled, so the oil industry comes back into the story in a way that is beyond good and bad, beyond melodrama and tragedy.
    • Along the way, Trabish gives readers a greater awareness of oil and how we became addicted to it. Awareness, Paul Roberts said in THE END OF OIL, "...may be the first tentative step toward building a more sustainable energy economy. Or it may simply mean that when our energy system does begin to fail, and we begin to lose everything that energy once supplied, we won't be so surprised."
    • Oil history journal articles by Dr. Trabish: Oil Stories and Histories
    • My Photo
      Name:
      Location: Agua Dulce, CA

      *Doctor with my hands *Author of the "OIL IN THEIR BLOOD" series with my head *Student of New Energy with my heart

      -------------------

      CONTACT: herman@newenergynews.net

      -------------------

      -------------------

      -------------------

      Pay a visit to the HARRY BOYKOFF page at Basketball Reference, sponsored by NewEnergyNews and Oil In Their Blood.

    • -------------------
    • NewEnergyNews

      Sunday

      Coal’s long flight now in turbulence

      There is a moment in the progress of any high altitude flight when the engines let off and the craft pitches down slightly; that is the beginning of the long descent for landing. In the past three weeks, our nation crossed a line in how we think about coal, and it now seems coal’s long flight of dominating how we produce electricity has embarked on a final decline.

      A pivotal lightning strike hit the industry on April 5, in a probably avoidable explosion at the Upper Big Branch mine in West Virginia. Lit up in the glare of the news cycle was Don Blankenship, CEA of of Massey Coal whose union busting and campaign of appealing safety violations has likely enabled to the explosion in his mine.

      Preceded by 53 safety violations in March and over 450 the previous year, the accident launched two federal investigations sought by West Virginia Senators Rockefeller and Byrd who are otherwise quite protective of the industry, plus a campaign of inspecting all mines in West Virginia was ordered by Governor Manchin.

      A Wall Street law firm has joined the pushback posse by seeking to know if Massey violated SEC regulations by failing to disclose risk properly to investors. Another investor group dubbed CtW is calling for the ouster of Blankenship and is joined by New York State’s Comptroller, Thomas DiNapoli who has direct control of over 300,000 shares of Massey stock through that state’s common retirement fund.

      There is nothing like a mass casualty incident to focus our politics, and the small chance of coal state pol’s voting for clean energy jobs and a climate bill is inching higher, especially as the national focus on coal’s danger may lead eyeballs to stumble upon a recent study by Downstream Strategies showing that the region’s coal reserves are in decline and the region needs diverse economic development immediately.

      Severe local turbulence can lead to loss of altitude, but more distant control can call for descent, too, in the form of federal regulation.

      Just days before the Montcoal catastrophe, the Environmental Protection Agency issued new rules to curb the practice of mountain top removal mining that is poisoning waterways and flattening Appalachia. It was denounced by Friends of Coal as a big job-killer, their usual line as the industry hates all job losses that they do not effectuate themselves from corporate offices. Also, later this month the EPA is scheduled to release new regulations for the handling of coal ash waste, the comeuppance for the spill of biblical proportions that cloaked eastern Tennessee, and this could impose serious costs onto the industry.

      As these forces converge to reduce some hazards of coal they could push the price of the black rock appropriately upward.

      We need coal to be priced according to it costs, and politics is moving in that direction, particularly as we look west. Citing the city’s home rule authority as their clout, Chicago’s City Council has joyfully presented an ordinance to regulate the emissions of two coal plants inside the city limits, and if that fails, to call for the plants’ retirement. Chicagoans suffer twice the asthma-related hospitalizations than the national average.

      Here in Boulder we too have home rule authority and are feeling a strong push to delay the signing of a new franchise agreement with Xcel Energy in favor of a new business arrangement crafted for decarbonization. This week all nine members of the City Council opined in a study session that times are changing and so must our energy production. Focusing on how coal is becoming less reliable, Susie Ageton put it forcefully: “We’ve got to make the shift – we’ve GOT to do it.”

      Maybe she knows that Colorado’s coal fields are faltering; the state hit peak production six years ago and “force majeure” has shut down mines four times since 2007. So industry should not be surprised that Governor Ritter will sign legislation calling on Xcel Energy to reduce by 80 percent of the nasty pollutants of key coal plants along the Front Range, with overt instruction to consider natural gas and low emitting sources as replacement for coal.

      We’re seeing the decline of coal; there may be air pockets to bump the industry back up and sharply down in its trajectory, but the fact is that the 150 year flight is just plain running out of gas. Many American communities are preparing for a smooth landing.