Peak oil notes – December 22
A midweekly roundup of peak oil news, including:
-Developments this week
Year: 2011
Climate – Dec 22
– Oilsands PR battle goes after Chiquita bananas
– Permafrost thaw — just how scary is it?
– Melting Permafrost
– Keystone XL update
Oil and geopolitics: a turbulent year, and no end in sight
Kazakhstan is moving fast to pacify its restive west as a new video circulates in which police shoot and beat retreating oil workers protesting labor conditions. Two reasons: With parliamentary elections three weeks away, President Nursultan Nazarbayev (pictured above) wants to stamp out any political narrative conflicting with his long-time assertion of keeping Kazakhstan stable. Abroad, the jittery global oil market is already starting to factor in a possible disruption of Kazakhstan’s 1.5 million barrels a day of oil exports
World – Dec 22
– Egyptian Military Advisor: Protesters Should “Be Thrown Into Hitler’s Ovens”
– Krugman: Will China Break?
– China’s epic hangover begins
– China’s top paper praises settlement of village dispute
– Greek woes drive up suicide rate to highest in Europe
– Fragments of a Defunct State (haves vs have-nots in Russia)
Food security and the WTO
This tension between trade and food security has emerged as a key dividing line in international negotiations at the WTO. There are, however, ways to transcend this debate and make real progress in feeding hungry people and preserving the livelihoods of farmers.
Collapse! The Game: Early draft
Some of you are aware that I have been working on a cooperative board game called Collapse! designed to help people learn and practice grassroots community-building and preparing locally for the various crises that may precede civilization’s collapse. I’ve finally got a first outline draft of the game, and decided to share it with the world before I go any further. Here are the rules and some images of the game equipment that I have developed thus far, along with a list of what I still have to do to complete the game’s development.
The government that likes to say ‘Yes’
Where between the situation we have now, with species becoming extinct but there still being enough green land to enable breathing, and the future development paradise where every scrap of field and hill is covered with concrete and tarmac, is development supposed to stop? Assuming that future generations will still need air to breathe, there must be a boundary, so how do we know that we have not already reached it? And if not, when will we know we are there?
YOU ARE HERE: The Oil Journey Presentation
Thanks to your support, we have just completed "You Are Here: The Oil Journey." This is a customizable presentation *you* can use to tell your own journey and to invite new people to join the larger conversation. This animated slide show delivers PCI’s core message honestly, but in a compassionate way that…well, just watch it and see for yourself.
How much dam energy can we get?
Having now sorted solar, wind, and tidal power into three “boxes,” let’s keep going and investigate another source of non-fossil energy and put it in a box. Today we’ll look at hydroelectricity. As one of the earliest renewable energy resources to be exploited, hydroelectricity is the low-hanging fruit of the renewable world. It’s steady, self-storing, highly efficient, cost-effective, low-carbon, low-tech, and offers a serious boon to water skiers. I’m sold! Let’s have more of that! How much might we expect to get from hydro, and how important will its role be compared to other renewable resources?
A Multilayered Anti-Pattern
Antipatterns are dysfunctional, wasteful of energy and resources, unsustainable and unhealthy in the long term, and they violate the human scale. Still, they are so seductive in their grand scale, and we are overwhelmed by their appearance and shiny surfaces. In fact, we have even made them our new temples!
How to Occupy the World
The leading tagline of the Occupy Wall Street movement reads: “Protest for World Revolution.” This is an ambitious claim, to be sure. And in most respects it seems to ring quite true: the movement has successfully taken root not only in cities and towns throughout the United States but also in major urban centers around the world…But the Occupy movement has been notably absent outside of North America and Europe….What accounts for the failure of Occupy to capture the imagination of the global South, which comprises precisely the people whose lives have been most brutally affected by the recent global financial crisis? And in what sense can Occupy claim to be a world revolution if it leaves out – and in some cases even alienates – the vast, non-white majority of humanity?
Can we manage without growth? An interview with Peter Victor. Part Two
There are many possible futures out there. I think that what I see is a huge amount of resources in our economy, both in terms of capital equipment, intellectual effort, finance, being directed towards the growth agenda. A different agenda, a different ambition for our society and our economy away from the pursuit of growth, would automatically free up, at least in principle, a lot of these resources.
