Peak Oil and Community Solutions Conference (Friday)
Stuart Staniford, The Oil Drum
I’m currently at the 2nd annual Peak Oil and Community Solutions Conference. I think I’m going to try and break my report up into three pieces, one per day of the conference to keep it manageable. These are getting posted after the conference is over, but each day’s report was written right after the conference that day, and then just lightly edited for correctness later. You’ll see the evolution through the conference. This is the first report, covering Friday.
For background, I work in the high-tech industry, and live in San Francisco. The conference is in Yellow Springs, Ohio, which is a tiny little town in the midwest. So that’s culture shock #1. And this conference very much draws the eco-sustainability wing of the peak oil movement, so that’s culture shock #2. The crowd here will cheer at the mention of Hugo Chavez’s name, or at the idea that we definitely should not solve this problem by building any more nuclear power plants. I suspect those sentiments will not have been expressed much at Roscoe Bartlett’s peak oil conference.
It’s an interesting thing about the peak oil movement that it completely cuts across the traditional political spectrum and makes for strange bedfellows. To a certain extent, you’ve either drunk the koolaid, and you’re obsessed and more-or-less frightened and ready to collaborate with anyone who shares your views on this issue, regardless of what they might think about gay marriage or abortion, or you haven’t and you won’t. Yet still there are discernable left/right/eco crowds within the movement. Here we have the eco crowd.
(26 September 2005)
The end of cheap oil
Rising prices at the pump are only the beginning
David Bacon, WorkingForChange
At the end of the 18th century, Thomas Malthus predicted population growth would outpace food production, resulting in widespread starvation. But within 50 years the industrial revolution was in full swing in England, powered by coal-fired steam engines. In 1866, in Clarion County, Pa., the first oil wells started production and the industrial age truly began.
Malthus’ dreary view seemed overblown.
The astounding differences in daily life between Malthus’ time and ours all result from the availability and use of cheap energy. The pace of technological advancement is so rapid that the average citizen can’t keep up. This wizardry — coupled with the mid-20th century “green revolution” in food production — leads many people, unfortunately including many political leaders, to assume that we can invent, exploit and develop our way out of almost any problem.
If we can, it is time to start.
(26 September 2005)
Gas crisis not a big surprise
Tom Funke, Battle Creek Inquirer
…You’ve heard the clichés: Drive Smarter. Drive Less. Carpool.
I don’t think it is that simple. I think a complete lifestyle change is in order by choice, through conservation, or by a crisis.
We live in an automobile dependant society; there won’t be a “magic pill” anytime soon. But until consumers demand cars with good mileage versus looking good, we will be stuck being offered gas guzzling trucks and SUVs.
You can either wait for an impending catastrophe or change your lifestyle. I choose the latter. I hope we all do, it will be less painful than a crisis.
(25 September 2005)
Ritawatch 5: James Howard Kunstler (AUDIO)
Global Public Media
Dave Room speaks with James Howard Kunstler, author of ‘The Long Emergency’, about the wider impacts and the underlying causes of the Gulf hurricanes
(24 September 2005)
Several more items on Hurrican Rita are on Global Public Media.
The Vicious Pincer
James Howard Kunstler, Clusterf*ck Nation
Shouts of deliverance rang through the gallerias and subdivisions of Houston, while the picture of what happened off-shore remains murky. Rita might have spared the nation’s fourth biggest metroplex, and most of the chemical-cracking infrastructure on-shore around it. But clawing up between Beaumont and Lake Charles, she cut a path through the densest concentration of offshore oil and gas rigs in the whole Gulf of Mexico. We don’t know they all came through yet, or how the pipelines below the surface fared.
What happens next on the oil and gas markets — and up-close in pump prices and home furnaces around the land — will be an interesting story.
The combined fury of Katrina and Rita has obviously flattened whole communities in a large area. One outcome will be what is called “demand destruction,” which means that the people who owned all those shredded homes, crushed cars, and flattened businesses will be using less oil in the months ahead. The catch is natural gas: the Gulf coastline is very temperate, even subtropical, and does not require much home heating. So, little demand for heating will have been affected, while the supply of natural gas has been cut twice in a month.
Half the houses in America are heated with natural gas and most of them are elsewhere than the Gulf Coast. On the markets, the price of gas is now heading north of $15 a unit (1000 cubic feet). It could easily hit $20 by Christmas, which would be about 700 percent higher than the price in 2002. Everyone in the non-Sunbelt is going to feel the pain this winter, and quite a few of the poor and infirm may freeze to death.
This is going to be a whole new kind of crisis for America and will set off a new kind of political fury. Both parties will get it in the neck but, of course, the Republicans led by the Bush White House will get it worse, because they are nominally in charge of things. There will be nothing they can do about the natural gas crisis. You can’t get any significant amount more of it from overseas because it requires special tankers and terminals to receive it, and those terminals will not be built before the robins come back to Kalamazoo. The Democrats will have to prove that they don’t deserve to join the Whigs in the Hall of Extinct Parties.
(26 September 2005)
Debate: energy policy for a gas-guzzling nation (AUDIO)
Margo Adler, Justice Talking, NPR
As gas prices reach near record highs, the focus on our nation’s energy policy is heating up. Although policymakers do not all agree on the best way to reduce U.S. reliance on foreign oil, they acknowledge that something must be done. Should diversification of the energy supply and increased production be the plan’s highest priority or should new technology and conservation be its focus? Guests:
James Howard Kunstler is a novelist and journalist who condemns the car-dependent suburbanization of America. He is the author of Geography of Nowhere, Home from Nowhere, The City in Mind, and The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of the Oil Age, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-first Century.
Jerry Taylor is one of the most frequently cited experts in energy and environmental policy in the nation. He has served on congressional advisory bodies and has testified at hearings on Capitol Hill. Taylor is the author of numerous studies and journal essays on energy and environmental issues, and has contributed to several anthologies, including Earth Report 2000: Revisiting the True State of the Planet. [He is associated with the Cato Institute.]
Paul Roberts writes and lectures frequently on the complex interplay of economics, technology, and the natural world. The End of Oil is his first book. Roberts also writes for Harper’s Magazine and The Los Angeles Times, and has appeared in many other magazines. He was a finalist for the National Magazine Award (1999) and for the New York Public Library Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism in 2005.
(8 September 2005)
German Peak Oil site
www.peakoil.de
INHALT
Peak Oil – Das Ende des billigen Erdöls Peak Oil und die moderne Zivilisation
Ölreserven der Welt Alternativen zu Öl? Globale Ölproduktion und Zukünftige Ölfunde
Alternativenergien Was kann ich tun?
Aktuelles Artikel & Archiv Bücher Links Impressum
Partner-Seite und Forum
(September 2005)
Recommended by Schweinshax at peakoil-dot-com
Spanish-language Peak Oil site
Crisis Energética
Noticias
Foros
Colaboraciones
Enlaces a otras webs
Eventos
(September 2005)
Mentioned by the website operator, peaknik, on The Oil Drum.
