Peak oil notes – Aug 11
A midweekly update of peak oil news, including
-Developments
-The IEA’s Oil Market report
Year: 2011
Hydromimicry: Water as a model for technology and management
Natural systems, including those that use or are sculpted by water, typically are energy-efficient, produce minimal wastes, and achieve multiple goals simultaneously. As both a tool and creator of nature’s designs, water’s use as a model has applicability to topics as diverse as climate change, energy selection, food production, human health, ecosystem restoration, network design, chemical synthesis, resource management, infrastructure planning, and the fine arts.
A fifty million dollar tipping point?
At a press conference on July 21, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced that he was contributing $50 million to the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal Campaign. Michael Brune, head of the Sierra Club, called it a “game changer”. It is that, but it also could push the United States, and indeed the world, to a tipping point on the climate issue. It is one thing for Michael Brune to say coal has to go, but quite another when Michael Bloomberg says so. Few outside the environmental community know who Michael Brune is, but every business person knows Michael Bloomberg as one of the most successful business entrepreneurs of his generation.
Con game
In both the entrepreneurial and the financial pyramid scams, the magic ingredient is confidence. The investors believe in the financial guru or in the person who initiates them into the marketing chain. And, of course, the investors are confident that they’ll make lots of money. In some cases, as in the pyramid schemes that ripped through the former communist world in the 1990s, many investors even knew about the fraud but believed that they could get in and get out with a bag of money before the whole thing collapsed.
If the analogy holds, then the U.S. economy is…a giant pyramid scheme?
Poetry in the Great Unravelling
England’s cities burn, the financial system continues its inexorable slide towards the pit, taking the real economy with it, socio-economic chaos stalks the declining West, and I am reading a poem.
Haircuts for All . . . or Free Money?
To get past the wall of potential financial-monetary collapse, governments would have to resort to extraordinary emergency measures. In the best instance, this would create time and space to begin coming up with long-term, infrastructural responses to declining energy supplies and climate change—responses involving the redesign of transport systems, power generation and transmission systems, food systems, and so on. Of course, there is no guarantee that time, once gained, will be well spent. Nevertheless, in principle the wall can be traversed.
Smashing the melon of American complacency with the mallet of Russian grit
Dmitry Orlov scares me. But it would be a shame if his fearsome reputation as a relentless doomer scared others off from reading the revised edition of his book that came out this year, Reinventing Collapse: the Soviet Experience and American Prospects. As a foreign-born analyst of the American scene, Orlov is as prescient as Alexis de Tocqueville. But Orlov, of course, is edgier, just like that other analyst of the American character: Gallagher. Yes, that Gallagher, the prop comic we loved in the 1980s for smashing watermelons on stage.
Biofuels – Aug 11
-Algae-Based Transportation Fuels Comes At A Cost
-Algae Could Solve World’s Fuel Crisis
-Ethanol-loving bacteria accelerate cracking of pipeline steels
-3 things you need to know about biofuels
Licking inflation the homestead way
Even when manufacturers purportedly “hold the line” on prices, inflation wins. The hoe you buy today for nearly the same price as the one you bought fifteen years ago will need repair or replacement twice as soon which means that the inflation occurs not only in your wallet but in the increasing height of the landfill. Or, what is very prevalent right now, the manufacturer holds the line on the price, but when you check the package, it holds somewhat less than it did previously.
Creating jobs by revitalizing local manufacturing
In a time of layoffs and outsourcing, something surprising is happening in San Francisco and New York: manufacturing jobs are on the rise.
Ending the hunger season
What we need are stories about how people are not only avoiding hunger but are living well. Such stories are myriad. Physically joining our own lives to such stories can help us see the abundant way of living we’re each called to embody.
Salvaging Health
Contemporary American culture has a self-defeating fondness for turning every issue into a conflict between absolute opposites denouncing one another in moral terms, and that’s heavily influenced one of the dimensions of everyday life that all of us have to deal with–the question of health care. The current standoff between the medical industry and alternative healing is subject to an unexpected wild card, though, because the two sides differ drastically in their vulnerability to the effects of peak oil.
