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Don’t be fuelled..
John Humphrys, Sunday Mirror (UK) via Transition Culture
… If the price of petrol keeps going up at this rate we’ll need to take out a second mortgage every time we stop on the motorway. But maybe it’s a good thing. For the last 40 years we’ve been told oil is running out and we’ll soon have to get used to living without it.
No more holidays on the Costas – it’s Skegness or Blackpool from now on, they said. And it’ll take a week to get there and back by bullock cart.
…The world runs on oil – whether it’s manufacturing fertiliser to grow our food or generating electricity to heat our homes. So what can we do – apart from getting the needles out and start knitting night caps to keep us warm in our icy bedrooms?
Well, one part of the answer may be something called “transition towns”. They’re springing up all over the country. The idea is that local people get together and arrange, for instance, to do a deal with farms in the area to buy their produce. So instead of buying carrots that have travelled halfway around the country to be packed and then sent back to your town, you buy them direct. And you don’t pay the supermarkets’ mark-up either.
Schemes to generate electricity locally are being set up too. By the time the juice from a big power station comes out of the socket in your wall half of it has already leaked out of the cables carrying it through the grid.
…You don’t believe there’s any need even to think about this sort of thing? You reckon this latest oil crisis is just another scare and the danger of global warming is being exaggerated?
Well maybe you’re right. I hope you are. But if you’re wrong, doesn’t it make sense to think local rather than rely on politicians at national and world level to get us out of the mess they’ve helped create?
Even if it doesn’t save the planet, the carrots will taste better.
(25 November 2007)
For us non-Brits, contributor Ben Brangwyn gives some background:
The Mirror is one of the UK’s top two tabloids. Usually serves up a fare of football (soccer), celebrity scoops and ministerial peccadillos.
The journo, John Humphreys, is one of mainstream media’s two top TV/Radio/Print rottweillers (the other being Jeremy Paxman) who have reduced hardened politicians to gibbering wrecks.
Humphreys is usually fair, thoughtful, ruthless and sceptical and something of a thought-leader. Here he names and frames Peak Oil and discusses community responses.
Rob Hopkins writes at Transition Culture:
You may not be regular readers of the Sunday Mirror, but last Sunday, BBC presenter and author John Humphreys wrote, in what I presume is a regular column, a piece about peak oil and Transition Initiatives. It actually came out rather well I thought… anyway, here it is. [re-posting of column follows]
Analyst sees oil prices between $75, $85 a barrel
Amy Strahan, Bloomberg News
Crude-oil prices aren’t fundamentally sustainable at $90 a barrel, said Thomas Petrie, vice chairman of Merrill Lynch & Co.
Petrie, in an interview Wednesday, responded to comments made earlier by Saudi Arabian Oil Minister Ali al-Naimi, who said there is “no relationship” between today’s price and fundamental supply and demand.
“Is there enough oil produced to meet demand today, and I think the answer is fundamentally yes,” Petrie said. “It is fair to say on a pure supply-and-demand calculation, it would not be unreasonable to expect prices to reach equilibrium at a lower price.”
Petrie said oil prices are at better equilibrium between $75 and $85 a barrel.
… At a 2005 “peak oil” conference in Denver, Petrie said world oil production could peak between 2010 and 2015, with a subsequent gradual decline in oil supplies and higher prices.
“This is not a catastrophe,” he said at the conference, “but the time to deal with it has come.”
(29 November 2007)
Campaigner Moore kicked out of council meeting
Jayne Hulbert, Taranaki Daily News (New Zealand)
Environmental campaigner Kevin Moore was told to leave a New Plymouth District Council meeting last night after he publicly slated councillors and staff.
Mr Moore was making a public comment at the beginning of last night’s monitoring committee meeting when his heated presentation – in which he called councillors and staff both criminally negligent and clinically insane – prompted several calls for his removal. Numerous calls for order from new committee chairman councillor Neil Wolfe were ignored by Mr Moore who continued his tirade.
But his presentation came to an abrupt end when council general manager of community assets Anthony Wilson crossed the chamber and pushed a microphone away from Mr Moore.
“Please remove yourself from the council chamber,” Mr Wolfe said.
As he prepared to leave, Mr Moore asked that it be noted by the media present that he was not “storming out” of the chamber.
“I am just quietly picking up my pieces of paper and walking out of the council chamber,” he said before leaving.
The presentation Mr Moore had been making urged council to prepare for the effects on the district of peak oil and climate change
(28 November 2007)
While Mr. Moore is right about the insanity of ignoring peak oil and climate change, it is yet not politically correct to say so. At some point, it will be the deniers who will be seen as cranks and who will be asked to leave the chambers of government. In meantime, let us heed the lesson of Ignaz Semmelweis and Illegitimi non carborundum. -BA
al-Huseini transcript now available
Global Public Media
A transcript of David Strahan’s interview with former top Saudi Aramco official Sadad al-Huseini is now available. Transcriptions and translations of our content help spread GPM’s important message to an even wider audience – to become a volunteer transcriber or translator for Global Public Media, please read the information page, then contact us.
Read the transcript
(28 November 2007)
Handy Hints For Post-Petroleum
Peter Goodchild, Countercurrents.org
The priority of these “hints” will vary as the years go by, but most of them will remain relevant over the course of the century. The slight bias toward northern North America is partly due to the fact that the area meets most of the criteria.
1 The world now has an average of 116 people for every square mile of land surface. In foraging (hunting-and-gathering) societies, on the other hand, there is an average of only about 0.1 person for every square mile. Since the survivors will be living closer to a “foraging” way of life than to an “industrial” one, the first and most obvious step is to move to somewhere with a low population density. (Crowded countries, on the other hand, will be experiencing famine.)
2 Everything in the modern world is dependent on hydrocarbons. From hydrocarbons we get fuel, fertilizer, pesticides, lubricants, plastic, paint, synthetic fabrics, asphalt, pharmaceuticals, and many other things. When oil goes, our entire industrial society will go with it. We must therefore look to “primitive” technology.
3 On a broader scale, one could can say that modern industrial society is based on (1) hydrocarbons, (2) metals, and (3) electricity. The three are intricately connected; each is only accessible – on the modern scale – if the other two are present. Electricity, for example, has been possible on a global scale only with hydrocarbons. The same is true of metals: most metals are now becoming rare, and the forms that remain can be processed only with modern machinery – which requires hydrocarbons. There is no way of breaking that “triangle.” What we are then looking at is a society far more primitive than the one to which we have been accustomed.
Peter Goodchild is the author of Survival Skills of the North American Indians, published by Chicago Review Press.
(22 November 2007)
Although I’m fascinated by the foraging skills about which Peter Goodchild writes, I don’t think they will be very useful. Intensive gardening, appropriate technology and social cooperation seem a better bet to me. -BA
