Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
I am perplexed by the almost complete lack of pedestrian streets in North America. Why is it that car-free commons—designed for pleasurable strolling, shopping and hanging out—which have become as typical as stoplights or McDonalds in European city centers, are almost non-existent here?
A weekly roundup of peak oil news, including:
-Oil and the global economy
-Tapping the reserves
-China
-Quote of the week
-Briefs
The public’s understanding of oil supply issues has not been enlightened by media coverage. From my perspective, the media does a terrible job of providing factual information concerning oil supply and oil price issues. Aspects of these issues appear to be taboo even for a media outlet such as National Public Radio which supposedly has the objective of educating the public about important societal issues.
When the formal economy fails, the informal economy is needed – and yet we have stripped the informal economy over the last decades. How to rebuild is a huge question – and one whose radicalism can’t be overstated. It involves completely reinventing our economy, among other things, since the domestic informal economy stands against industrial growth capitalism and undermines the idea that we can have economy based largely on consumer spending. If you make, rather than buy, well, that changes a lot of things.
-Back to the Future
-Behaviour change, not technology, is key to cutting vehicle emissions
-The great land grab: India’s war on farmers
Within a society where physical consumerism has been the norm, consuming events — we might call it intellectual consumerism — is a real issue. I see it a lot in my native Los Angeles, particularly within the old-style environmental circles. People show up for a meeting or a movie or a political rally, but it doesn’t scratch the surface. There’s no lifestyle change, or there’s negligible lifestyle change to go with it. They show up for the meetings but then go home to same-old, same-old. It’s revealed by their small talk, by the THINGS they admire and coo over. There are some people who are massive consumers of environmental events.
Friends smile wanly when they see my wife’s corrugated washboard in the sink. They wonder when we are going to go down to the “crick” and pound our clothes on the rocks. This is very funny, of course, but it reveals the modern ignorance about washing clothes that is becoming nearly universal. A washboard is still the cheapest and often the only way to get dirty clothes clean… buy one that is only rough surfaced. The ones that are only smooth-surfaced are no good for dirty clothes… and if the clothes aren’t dirty, well, throw them in the automatic washer. It does a real good job on clean clothes.
-Behind Veneer, Doubt on Future of Natural Gas
-S.E.C. Shift Leads to Worries of Overestimation of Reserves
-Insiders Sound an Alarm Amid a Natural Gas Rush
Global leaders are now implementing another stimulative measure that they hope will prevent the economy from teetering over into recession once again: lowering oil prices through the coordinated release of 60 million barrels of oil into the market from government-run strategic petroleum reserves. The move seemed to have the desired effect as oil prices fell more than 5 percent after the announcement. The question is: Why did they wait until now?
Writing this book has been a fascinating work. Re-examining the story of “The Limits to Growth” opens up a whole new world that urban legends and propaganda had tried to bury under a layer of lies and misinterpretations. We all have heard of the “mistakes” that the authors of LTG, or their sponsors, the Club of Rome, are said to have made. But LTG was not “wrong”: nowhere in the 1972 book you find the mistakes that are commonly attributed to it.
There has been a lot of commentary within the peak oil movement as of late noting that the concept seems to be creeping ever closer to mainstream acceptance. While we should be heartened that the logic of our arguments is finally beginning to shine through the fog of denial and obfuscation, we also need to remind ourselves that we still have a long way to go before any major political leader will be willing to come out and flatly acknowledge the truth. So how will we know when that happens? I suspect it will be when we hear this phrase uttered in connection with peak oil: “Nobody could have predicted…”
So, now, here we are in late June, four months later, after a lot of the negative economic consequences have occurred, and the IEA has now decided to release 30 days worth of extra oil, until certain unnamed oil producers, presumably mainly Saudi Arabia, can increase production.
