Year: 2011

An alternative version for three of the “key graphs” in IEA’s 2010 World Energy Outlook

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Recently Jorgen Randers (best known for being one of the co-authors of The limits to Growth, 1972) asked me to do some modelling work on the World3-Energy model, an updated version of the classic World3 computer model that was used in The Limits to Growth that includes a much larger amount of information about energy. …

The main point of disagreement is that the IEA seems to believe most of the changes will happen quietly in the background, with the average citizen of the Western world barely noticing that the brand new cars just happen to be electric. World3-Energy suggests that the changes are likely to happen among very real concerns about world food production and other similarly “minor” issues.”

Basketball patches and plastic jug blossoms

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People who pass on the road sometime slow down considerably when they see our patch of basketballs and our plastic jugs in bloom. Our gardens are beginning to look like a modern exhibit of recycled trash art. But we have gone berserk only in the sense that wild animals are driving us there. We spend as much time now protecting our food supply from predators like deer and raccoons as we do planting and weeding.

Rising hydrocarbon costs: A quick summary for policy makers

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During the past century, world economic growth has depended largely on ever-expanding use of hydrocarbon energy sources: oil for transportation, coal and natural gas for electricity generation, oil and gas for agricultural production. It is no exaggeration to say that the health of the global economy currently hinges on increasing rates of production of these fuels.

Green energy internships in cutting edge ecovillage

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Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage in northeastern Missouri is one community pushing forward their own micro-scale energy research. Like most small villages, Dancing Rabbit isn’t filled with PhD qualified engineers. They’re ordinary people, some with interests in formal scientific research, some with a focus on organic farming or green building methods, so they decided to launch a renewable energy internship to encourage interested engineers and university-level engineering students into the community for a summer.

Leaving the casino

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I work with the assumption that waking up to Peak Oil and preparing for Transition is just a special case of awakening in general, and that this awakening requires really looking at the symbols we’ve created and how we relate to them. Casinos provide an illuminating glimpse into the challenges of waking up within entrenched and often tyrannical systems of signs.

A culture of dependency

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Energy systems do not exist in a social vacuum but are subject to culture and imagination. Anyone interested in promoting an energy transition away from oil and fossil fuels more generally needs to take this fact into account. Unfortunately, energy culture has often been overlooked as an explanation of U.S. energy development.

Fracking – a tale of gas and greed and global warming

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Every now and again it seems like a solution has been found to our energy problems, one that will allow us all to go on consuming (and wasting!) for decades, if not forever. In the last few years shale gas has bubbled to the top of the pile and is now being widely touted by the oil and gas industry as: a) a clean, green alternative to coal and oil; b) proof that Peak Oil/Gas is many years off; and c) a cheaper use of government subsidies than support for renewables.

A bold move, but our oil problems are just beginning

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The IEA decision to release 60 million barrels from strategic petroleum reserves (SPR) of member nations has been criticized as politically motivated, too small and too late to matter, or, at best, as a desperate attempt to fend off economic woes. The reality and impact of the decision are more complex than that. The move is a bold, price-suppressing “poke in OPEC’s eye” from nations that have been perpetual price takers in the world oil market. The short-term rationale for the decision, however, should not obscure our real oil problem – geopolitics is combining with economics and geology to put us in an oil crunch that is not likely to abate until our nation moves beyond oil.

Cultivating an ecological conscience (a book review)

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Farmer-philosopher Frederick L. Kirschenmann’s recently published collection of essays, Cultivating an Ecological Conscience, with its clear concern for the part petroleum plays in modern agriculture, offers significant common ground for farmers and carbon-footprint conscious, twenty-first century environmentalists. This alone would make Kirschenmann’s book important, but it also does such a thorough job of describing the current state of agriculture, it would be difficult to find a more comprehensive compilation of essays on the subject.