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David Holmgren and FutureScenarios.org (Part 1) (audio)
Jason Bradford, Reality Report via Global Public Media
The Reality Report interviews David Holmgren. David co-invented permaculture over 30 years ago and has been a practitioner and teacher ever since, both at his home in Australia and as a consultant around world. In 2002 he published the book Permaculture: Principles and Pathways Beyond Sustainability that reviewed permaculture in the context of peak energy. More recently, David created a web site called Future Scenarios, see www.futurescenarios.org. This interview is based on that web site and was recorded on July 14, 2008.
The complete interview is nearly two hours long and is therefore broken into two segments. In this first installment, we discuss a broad view of history as related to ecology, energy and societal complexity. The development of permaculture in the context of 1970s economic woes is reviewed. David explains why he created http://FutureScenarios.org as an alternative to the predominant beliefs in either business as usual or a smooth steady state transition towards “sustainability,” as well as the simplistic notion of a “Mad Max” type collapse.
The second installment (to be posted) covers four “energy descent” scenario groups that correspond to potential variation in the severity of both peak oil and climate change.
(14 July 2008, but just posted)
August ASPO Newsletter
C.J.Campbell, ASPO-Ireland
1067. Ireland’s Response to Peak Oil
1068. New Books
1069. ASPO-6 Presentations
1070. ASPO-7 International Conference, Barcelona, Spain
1071. Nigeria re-examined
1072. Nationalism
1073. Signs of the Times
1074. Turkey’s Renewed Importance
1075. News from ASPO Australia
1076. An Atlas of Oil and Gas Depletion
(August 2008)
The green gender gap (in peak oil)
Vanessa Farquharson, National Post
… It’s interesting to note that, for whatever reason, most of the voices behind this apocalyptic panic [peak oil] are male.
But a growing collective of female bloggers are now writing about peak oil, more often in the context of how many strawberries we should dehydrate in order to be prepared for a crisis, and whether or not stocking up on brown rice is considered hoarding.
Casaubon’s Book, for instance — a popular blog run by Sharon Astyk — focuses on peak oil and various environmental issues. But the writer is less interested in dwelling on gloomy predictions than she is in sharing her wisdom about the storage life of grains. One recent post went into some depth about canning and lactofermentation.
“A lot of what you read about climate change, peak oil or economic crisis focuses on the future,” she says. “The goal is to motivate you to action by describing what may happen. I do some of that, but over the last year or so, I’ve found myself replacing the future tense with the present — describing not what might happen, but what is.”
Astyk believes that if we keep focusing on predictions, models and hypotheses about peak oil, we’re missing the point.
… arguing that men and women have different, gender-specific responses to global warming or the looming oil crash is a broad generalization, and one that could very well prove unfounded.
However, there’s no question that the majority of women writing about peak oil are considerably more focused on what we can do now to make life better, not just what we may have to do at some point down the road.
Even if nothing happens — if the polar ice caps cease to melt, the smog in Beijing just disappears one day and endangered species begin multiplying in vast numbers — it hardly means all that tomato-canning and cycling to work was a waste of time.
Better, then, to keep track of all the peak oil news, but remind people like Savinar and Kunstler that we need to be acting, not just reacting.
(31 July 2008)
Strange article to find in the National Post – the author is suprisingly knowledgeable about the peak oil blogosphere. I agree with her there is a definite gender difference in how people initially approach peak oil. Yin and yang, I guess. Over time, though, the viewpoints spill over into one another. -BA
Peak Football and waving goodbye to Ronaldo
Rob Hopkins, Transition Culture
… While football isn’t a subject often touched on here at Transition Culture, I have to confess I love it, and am fascinated by what we might come to call ‘peak football’. Football is not immune to the credit crunch nor to rising fuel prices, and in this age of ridiculous salaries being given to top players and insane transfer fees, something, at some point, has to give, and it looks like it might be starting to happen as we speak.
I have to say that I am a great admirer of Cristiano Ronaldo. Yes he can be cocky, arrogant, in love with himself and so on, but he is the most extraordinary player I have ever watched, able to do things with a football that defy belief and which keep you on the edge of your seat whenever he gets the ball.
… There are interesting trends afoot in the world at the moment, as high oil prices focus people’s minds and what was unthinkable 6 months ago becomes common sense now. Some big companies such as Proctor and Gamble are looking towards more localised approaches, breaking their centralised operations down into more decentralised operations. In the same way, Wenger (who has often been criticised for fielding teams with not a single British player) is starting to look more towards focusing on the production of local talent, saying “a big club like ours must rely first of all on youth development as we want to bring the core strength of the club through the youth system”.
As the time arrives for being more frugal, for preparing for a new world of economic contraction and energy scarcity, football clubs will need to beat a retreat from the ridiculous spending and wages that recent years have seen, eventually returning to teams of local people representing the local community they purport to represent (what a quaint notion).
… As [Arsenal’s manager Arsene Wenger] concludes in the BBC piece, “I recently met the chairman of a Brazilian club who told me they are negotiating all their contracts down by 50% as the TV company cannot pay the money. All over the world, TV money has gone short and there will be consequences on football.”
I will miss the dazzling, twinkling footwork of Ronaldo, the match-making brilliance that could turn a game in a moment of brilliance, but times are changing and like the rest of us, it is time to cut our cloth to suit the times. In the same way that our degree of oil dependence equates to our degree of oil vulnerability, the degree of indebtedness for our football clubs will, over the next few seasons, become their vulnerability. Some have already gone out out of business and many others can’t be far from it. We need to start seeing any valuable possessions we have as offering potential ways out of indebtedness, something in a year or two we may turn out to have been very grateful for. We may come to kick ourselves for having missed the opportunity.
(25 July 2008)
A Guide to Making the Transition Away From Oil
Scott Carlson, Chronicle of Higher Education (journalist’s blog)
Rob Hopkins is a doctoral student at Plymouth University in England and the founder of the Transition movement-the transition he advocates is away from oil and toward self-sufficiency. He is a proponent of the theory of peak oil, which says that oil production will reach a high point, then begin a cruel decline, and he believes the peak is imminent. Most peak oilers are an apocalyptic lot, thinking that the end of oil will lead to some kind of Mad Max future. Mr. Hopkins, by comparison, is incredibly optimistic.
“The change we have seen over the past 100 years will be nothing compared with what we will see over the next 20,” he said over the phone from his home in Totnes, in southwestern England. “It’s an extraordinary time to be alive. I feel really fortunate to be around.”
… Colleges are often like little towns of their own, and many colleges are increasingly involved and intertwined with their surrounding communities. So why not form a “transition college”? Colleges are going to have to get serious preparing for future energy crises, and they should start thinking about how they might deal with them now. Most colleges are thinking mainly about cutting carbon emissions, which Mr. Hopkins believes is important but secondary to dealing with the energy crisis. Climate change is an end-of-tailpipe problem, while peak oil is an into-fuel-tank problem, to paraphrase peak-oil proponent Richard Heinberg.
(1 August 2008)
Add The Chronicle of Higher Education to the list of peak-aware publications. Author Scott Carlson recently wrote: Colleges should plan – and teach – for an oil-scarce world.
Peak oil pundits perplexed by reality
Harvey Enchin, Vancouver Sun
Falling prices do not fit into the theories of those who argue that world production is in irreversible decline
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Peak oil proponents and fellow cultists in the climate change camp must be scratching their heads over the recent dip in crude oil prices. If oil production has peaked, its decline irreversible, and global demand continues to rise, why would prices drop?
On the basis of peak oil theory, investing in oil futures should be a no-brainer: Go long until the world ends.
But data released last week by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission showed speculative funds shifting to a net short position for the first time in 17 months. In plain English, traders, whom the ill-informed were quick to blame for driving up prices, are betting oil prices will fall.
… While peak oil hysteria has hijacked the debate, there are legitimate reasons to be concerned about the supply of oil. For a start, output from some of the world’s conventional fields is indeed declining, but at a much slower rate, according to Cambridge Energy Research Associates, than the eight per cent claimed by the alarmists
(1 August 2008)
It would be good if Harvey Enchin actually looked into what was being said by peak oil thinkers, rather than making things up. A number of peakniks are successful investors who know that trends don’t go in a straight line — many of us warned that oil prices might fall for a time after the current run-up. To paraphrase Rep. Roscoe Bartlett, “We may be peakniks, but we aren’t idiots!” -BA
The Sun published a letter critical of the column.
