NewEnergyNews-Butterfield Archive

WALL STREET JOURNAL'S Environmental Capital quotes NewEnergyNews:

  • 06/05/2007

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

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

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    Twitter Updates

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

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    • 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

      • About Me

      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

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      CONTACT: herman@newenergynews.net

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

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      • NewEnergyNews

      Friday

      Twenty-Somethings of Colorado With Skin in the Game

      Twenty-Somethings of Colorado With Skin in the Game
      Anne B. Butterfield, November 22, 2011 (Huffington Post)

      The people of Boulder won. The final vote tallies for 2B and 2C -- the two measures empowering the city of Boulder to delve further and perhaps finally into buying the electric delivery system from Xcel Energy and setting up a utility -- are in, and their slim winning margins were strengthened slightly.

      Gone are the mind-numbing ads; gone are the phone calls and door knocking. On is the city's go-ahead to proceed.

      Two campaign forces drove this election and they each have skin in the game. On one side is Xcel with its oft-stated conviction that the Boulder distribution system is not for sale. We can sniff out from their campaign efforts and the reports on their profits that the system is some kind of a money press.

      The other force is not the self-muzzled city government nor its many seasoned, and reportedly hearing-aid assisted, activists. No, these ones don't have so much skin in the game in that these will be dead by the time the earth approaches or even surpasses two degrees celsius of warming, as darkly predicted two weeks ago by the International Energy Agency if nations do not curb emissions sharply in five years.

      No, the powerhouse that won the election was the one with the most real skin in the game -- real, feeling skin. They are the ones who will outlive those of us who are bequeathing them this dangerous climate.

      They're the ones who will outlive the retirees who buy the bulk of stocks from investor owned utilities for their dividends, as emphasized by Andy Walters of JP Morgan to a utility conference in Denver this June: "Don't forget you've got a lot of retirement funds riding on your decisions."

      The group that won the election is the one that's taking the big hit in the generational war and is fighting back. It's the group that put a funky puce-colored ad online blaring, "DUMP XCEL" with a heart message for clean energy and some curlicue script beckoning, "Vote!" The group is the gifted throng of twenty-somethings in a youth oriented political engagement group called New Era Colorado.

      Leading up to the election, New Era reportedlymade 25,000 voter contacts to sort out supportive voters, then in the "get out the vote" phase made another 15,000 contacts. Election day saw 65 people making calls from their office. The group has four paid staff members while everyone else on the campaign was a volunteer, hailed from New Era's quarry of hundreds of volunteers and interns plus others from multiple groups. Sporting about in New Era's emblazoned Trailways-style bus, those volunteers moved as a swarm of green and yellow shirts and on Halloween night tromped around in costume to scare out the vote. They have been hailed as the reason 2B and 2C won.

      Started a few years ago by two "student government nerds" Steve Fenberg and Joe Neguse (who went on to be a CU regent), New Era was born on a big grant won with only 12 hours to spare on the application deadline, with money doled out in segments as goals were reached. Having both 501c3 and 501c4 status, the group has three priorities: voter registration, issue work for current elections and policy for legislation. The group trains up to 100 interns per year and has won new policy through the CU Regents allowing students to register to vote online when signing up for class.
      So don't let the groovy campaign bus fool you; this outfit is about results.

      "We want to get to these youth voters before they get feeling disenfranchised because it feels like government is too big and removed for a vote to make a difference," Steve Fenberg texted from Moscow, where he's been invited to confer with youth democracy groups. "The whole point of New Era is to get people engaged in a hands-on democracy, with the tools to impact the process before they're pissed about an issue and feel like their opinion doesn't matter."

      New Era has an office in Denver, where they will need to resume efforts to address an increasingly endangered future. Their next effort could perhaps be to remind Denver City Council and Xcel ratepayers that its franchise with Xcel Energy is coming up for renewal soon. Xcel Energy has just issued its "2011 Resource Plan" indicating it intends to refurbish two coal plants and it has no firm commitment to install more renewables until 2028.

      So if you're reading this with a toddler rolling around the floor, Xcel might add no more renewables to its coal and gas dominated system until your babe is in college. This as the IEA has declared our children's climate is being pushed over a cliff. This is the time to pay even more attention to Xcel's emissions, and New Era Colorado is up to the task.

      posted by Herman K. Trabish @ 5:42 AM