Year: 2011

Digging out the truth about Saudi oil

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A senior Saudi Arabian oil official said in 2007 that the kingdom has 388 billion barrels of recoverable crude oil reserves, about 45 percent more than official public estimates. But about the same time, a retired Saudi Aramco executive met with U.S. diplomats in Dhahran, and asserted that Saudi figures in general are wildly overblown, and that his country is headed for a production peak around 2020, followed by a slow decline, according to new Wikileaks cables. The issue is pivotal.

Energy funds, energy flows

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The recent report from World Wildlife Fund insisting that the world can transition to renewable energy while maintaining current developed world lifestyles and abolishing Third World poverty is simply one more in a long series of loudly heralded cornucopian fantasies well detached from the hard realities of the industrial world’s predicament. The sheer amounts of cheap energy that modern civilization has to hand has blinded too many people to the fact that “vast” and “infinite” are not synonyms — and that blindness has significant implications for the near future.

The Power of the Permablitz

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The permablitz is a short but intense transfer of beneficial energy where members of the community come together to implement a project or landscape installation designed to provide more resources or energy than it consumes, commonly a permaculture design. Operating on a give-help-and-then-be-helped basis, these fun-filled and informative events overcome many of the pronounced barriers facing individuals for implementing regenerative designs and structures.

Transition footwear

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I’ve been wearing my boots all over L.A. these days (the ankle is slowly getting better). At first it felt kind of werrd — big boots that really didn’t go with anything but garden jeans. But there’s a solidness to the clump-clump-clump they make. These things mean business. They’re for going out and getting some serious work done. They’re the shoes of a producer, not a consumer. And I’m proud to be wearing ’em.

To ‘Frack’ or not to ‘Frack’?

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Ohio, the home of John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil, and site of the world’s largest oil-producing provinces in the late 19th century, is again at the center of the action in domestic fossil fuel production as a controversial drilling technique, known as fracking, is draining Ohio’s remaining oil and gas reserves. With global oil production peaking and the number of new large oil finds dwindling, is increased domestic production in Ohio and other states through fracking a vital contribution to our energy security, or a fate to be fought?

Community asset ownership 1: an interview with Sara Neuff of Coin Street Community Builders

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If a community owns its assets, then the community itself can decide what’s important within that community and it’s not subject to the vagaries of say, changes in local government, changes in government funding even –for example, the times we’re in at the moment. All of those things mean that you can actually keep going regardless of the chaos around you, you can control your own situation and earn your own money and deliver your own balance of business in that way.

Corporate control? Not in these communities

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These communities are adopting laws that, taken together, are forming an alternative structure to the global corporate economy. The principles behind these laws can be applied broadly to any area where corporate rights override local self-government or the well-being of the local ecology.

Transition initiatives and resilience – Part 1

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To understand the Transition Movement requires understanding the significance and broadness of the word resilience as the movement uses it. It may be that many Transition supporters are assuming the common definition and are content with it, unaware of the more complex meanings. If so, this could be problematic later.

Book review: “The Tyranny of Oil” by Antonia Juhasz

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Before we can hope to prepare the US for climate change and peak oil, Antonia Juhasz says citizens can and must break the power of Big Oil in Washington. Until we dislodge America’s “oiligarchy,” any plan to ramp up clean energy and conservation is doomed to fail. Oil may be the most powerful industry on Earth, but Juhasz thinks that if we break up Exxon, Chevron and the other oil majors in the style of Standard Oil, AT&T or Enron, we take bring Big Oil back down to a manageable size and take back America’s energy future.