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Peak Oil and Community Solutions Conference (Sunday)
Stuart Staniford, The Oil Drum
Staniford reports and comments on the speakers on the last day of the conference:
- The morning began with a witty and fascinating presentation from Diana Christian, who is the editor of Communities magazine, and a resident of Earthaven Ecovillage, an intentional community in North Carolina….
…the conference organizers are correct in identifying that some of these communities have considerable relevance to peak oil because they are almost the only places in the developed world where we can see people trying to live with little or no modern energy sources (which they did out of choice rather than necessity).
- Next up was Liz Walker, the burning soul behind Ecovillage at Ithaca, a project in Ithaca, New York. This development involves multiple cohousing communities intermixed with natural areas and community supported agriculture projects. From a peak oil perspective, it showcases integration of housing with local food production…
- Megan Quinn is the Outreach Director for Community Service, Inc and is also project manager for Agraria, a deliberately planned post-peak community. Megan looks like she’s about 16 years old, but belied that impression with a powerfully delivered and confident summation of the last 250 years of industrial history and the likely consequences of unwinding it’s energy basis. The broad knowledge of the issues, commitment demonstrated via extensive travel and study, and general thoughtfulness and maturity in one so young suggest a powerful future leader.
Community Service believes a likely consequence of peak oil will be a need to resettle agricultural areas. Currently around 2% of the workforce is involved in agriculture – as recently as the 1930s, it was 50%. Instead of people, we use massive petroleum powered machines. Just as in Cuba, it is very unclear that our agricultural system can evolve to a low-oil future without massive transformation to being much more labor intensive…
- Bob Waldrop is a huge teddy bear/Santa Claus of a man who ebulliently told us of his efforts organizing something called the Oklahoma Food Cooperative. This is not your usual food coop – co-operatively owned retailing of healthier foods. It’s more radical than that: an attempt to build an alternative and local food distribution system. Using the web, they are building a local market between food producers in Oklahoma and food consumers in Oklahoma. The goal is to have a less transportation-intensive system (food in the US is consumed an average of 1500 miles from where it is produced) that will be more robust in the face of oil shortages, and to produce healthier foods….
- Richard Heinberg gave the final summation. …[he said] as we go through the de-fossil-fuelizing of this society, we can expect absolutely profound and radical change in everything about our society – its social organization, its political organization, and its cosmological beliefs. This is scary and overwhelming and is likely to get more so. And yet, as a society, we almost certainly have choices between options that are better and worse. We would like to do this without descending into Fascism. We would like, if at all possible, to achieve this transition without a large scale die-off.
Those of us in the peak oil movement have a very important role to play. As individuals who understand what is going on, when the larger society does not yet, the knowledge and expertise we have developed is likely to get very valuable. And we have an opportunity to provide leadership at every level as the rest of society increasingly tries to figure out what the hell is going on. It is our responsibility to exercise that leadership as energetically and wisely as we can in order to steer the transition as well as possible.
…[Staniford concludes] My strongest impression is that peak oil is spawning a political movement. That’s my new insight. I have tended to view peak oil through the lenses of dynamics, of economics, even of military strategy, but not that of politics. And yet this is going to be a political movement.
(28 September 2005)
See the website for more text, photos and many comments from readers. Staniford has posted reports on the Day One and Day Two of the conference. -BA
A peek at Peak Oil, Inc.
WW drops in on a true Portland-style financial seminar
Adrian Chen
War. Famine. Pestilence. Death. It’s a mid-September Thursday night, and these calamities are projected in bold, black letters onto the wall of a basement conference room in the downtown Portland Marriott. Those are a few of the bleaker scenarios predicted once global oil production begins to dwindle, explains Dr. Kenneth Deffeyes, a Princeton geologist and author of Beyond Oil: The View From Hubbert’s Peak. Published earlier this year, the book offers a less-than-optimistic view of the coming global energy crisis.
“I took those words from the four horsemen in the Bible,” Deffeyes jokes at the podium. The audience of about 250, a bizarre mix of dreadlocked enviros and clean-cut financial types, laughs nervously. They’re here for a seminar on energy investment hosted by MKG Financial, a local trends investment firm.
Deffeyes, the keynote speaker, is among the leaders in a growing faction of scientists, politicians, and activists-known as the Peak Oil movement-who are clamoring that the Age of Oil is about to end. Soon. In fact, Deffeyes predicts that global oil production will peak this Thanksgiving, thus beginning a long, painful slide to zero.
Judging from his own financial advice, Deffeyes is a strange choice to speak at an investment forum: Earlier in the day, he half-jokingly advised me to put my savings into 1/8th-ounce gold pieces. His argument: “They’ll be easier to make change with” than larger pieces in a post-apocalyptic economy.
(28 September 2005)
Matt Simmons Issues a Wake Up Call
Jeanne Klobnak-Ball, Planet (Jackson Hole, WY)
Like the terrorist attacks of 9/11, Hurricane Katrina stands to become a defining moment in our nation’s history. While the precise meaning of such moments remains to be interpreted, Matt Simmons believes the natural disaster may well be remembered as the start of “our great energy war.” “We’re almost at the verge of having real energy shortages,” Simmons said last Friday, when he issued a wake-up call to a standing-room only audience at the Center for the Arts. “We could be looking at $10-a-gallon gas this winter.”
Author of “Twilight in the Desert: The Coming Saudi Oil Shock and the World Economy” and founder of Simmons and Company International, a Houston-based energy investment banking firm managing over $60 billion in assets, Simmons is also an energy advisor to President Bush. During his lecture which kicked off a two-day lecture series on the future of energy sponsored by the University of Wyoming’s Ruckelshaus Institute of Environment and Natural Resources Simmons reviewed circumstances leading up to the current energy crisis.
(28 September 2005)
The Apollo of Their Eye
Apollo Alliance now shooting for the statehouse instead of the moon
Amanda Griscom Little, Grist magazine
By now the mission of the two-year-old D.C.-based Apollo Alliance — to mobilize a grand-scale federal commitment to energy independence, with the triple-whammy promise of creating good jobs with new technology, bolstering national security with energy independence, and saving the planet from carbon emissions — has become something of a cliché.
That’s both a creditable triumph and, some argue, a concerning liability. On the one hand, thanks to Apollo and other like-minded organizations, the virtues of energy independence are now almost universally applauded in the theater of American politics, as likely to be extolled in The Wall Street Journal and The National Review as on this website. On the other, the Apollo agenda may be suffering from its sheer agreeableness: It’s attracted coalition partners from a broad spectrum, but consensus among those partners centers on general concepts rather than specific, hard-hitting policy proposals.
Named after President Kennedy’s visionary moon shot, which launched America’s space-exploration program, the Apollo Alliance is a coalition of labor, business, and environmental advocates that aims to unify the country behind a 10-year, $300 billion program of investment in clean-energy technology. The alliance claims its proposal would create more than 3 million new jobs, eliminate American dependence on Middle East oil imports, lead to 15 percent of U.S. electricity coming from renewable sources, and reduce national energy consumption by 16 percent.
(28 September 2005)
Long article, bringing us up to date about Apollo.
Peaknik and Doomer on
WikiPedia
“Peaknik: A peaknik is a person who studies or has an interest in the Peak Oil or the Hubbert peak theory of oil depletion proposed by M. King Hubbert and is concerned for the possible long effects on society. Peakniks are also involved in promoting public awareness of Peak Oil.
Peaknik is a variation of the term peacenik. The use of “-nik” evokes a counterculture attitude to the status quo.
Many peakniks meet to discuss peak oil and awareness raising. A Worldwide Directory of local peaknik groups is being catalogued at Sydney Peak Oil”
“Doomer: A Doomer is a peaknik that in addition to the normal peak oil concerns over oil depletion leading to a severe economic recession or Great Depression, also believes in the inevitability of a Malthusian Catastrophe at the end of the cheap oil era.”
Doomer is apparently being considered for deletion, follow link to have a say.
As someone who has been called a doomer more than once, I don’t believe a return to subsistence level conditions is inevitable, wonder what timescale the author means by the end of the cheap oil era, and doubt whether many doomers are involved in promoting public awareness.-LJ
