Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
The second half of the oil age will be very, very different from the first half. The first half was awash with cheap, easy-to-find and easy-to-produce oil and gas. The second half will be the story of expensive-to-produce hydrocarbons, from increasingly inaccessible places … Unless we are able to break our addiction to hydrocarbons sooner rather than later, it will be a wretched and increasingly desperate time of squeezing fuel out of anything we can.
A weekly roundup of peak oil news, including:
-Oil and the global economy
-Conflict in the Middle East
-Japan
-Obama’s Energy Plan
-Quote of the week
-Briefs
These days, spiritual understandings of “simple living” go to great lengths to evade discussions of finance, thus perpetuating an environment where “living simply” requires “spending amply.”
However, when we look at the global economy from the point of view of a long-term decline in global net oil exports, it seems very likely that, to paraphrase a famous quote, what can’t be funded and maintained won’t be funded and maintained; and that the funding and maintenance problem will probably continue to become most apparent in the short term in American suburbia and exurbia.
If, a century ago, the keenest talking heads of the age (who would that have been, I wonder: Chesterton, Shaw, Belloc, Jo Chamberlain?) had battled it out amongst themselves about the future of infrastructure and energy, what would that debate have looked like?
Die zentrale Aussage dieses Buches ist sowohl einfach als auch alarmierend: Wirtschaftswachstum, wie wir es aus der Vergangenheit kennen, ist aus und vorbei. German translation of the introduction to Richard Heinberg’s new book ‘The End of Growth’.
For large parts of eastern Japan that were not directly hit by the tsunami on 11 March 2011, including the nation’s capital, the current state of affairs feels very much like a dry-run for peak oil. This is not to belittle the tragic loss of life and the dire situation facing many survivors left without homes and livelihoods. Rather, the aim here is to reflect upon the post-disaster events and compare them with those normally associated with the worst-case scenarios for peak oil.
And so, the answer to the perennially annoying question “How do I invest my money for it to survive financial, political and commercial collapse?” is this: “There is no answer to your question. Try asking a different question, to which there might be an answer.”
In 2004 I was an idealistic young college graduate who hoped to change the world. I was convinced that the prospect of declining worldwide oil production loomed, and that people must heed my calls for energy conservation and radically-relocalized living. The world didn’t seem to change, but to my surprise, something else did—my hometown.
Here is the Spring collection of permaculture tips and tricks from the Southern Oregon Permaculture Institute, enjoy.
-International Conference on Global Land Grabbing
-Coalition Government ‘must step up to the plate on sustainable food’
-Subsidies and the “True Cost of Food”
-Kenyans fear Dakatcha Woodlands biofuel expansion
-Who feeds Bristol? Towards a resilient food plan
-Huber warns EU president of glyphosate danger to livestock and plant
Walt Disney’s “Our friend, the atom” was full of optimism and of hope for the wealth and prosperity that the atomic age would bring to us. It is a shock, today, to look back to those times and realize how much it had been promised and how little was actually delivered.
