Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
As the Greek financial system lurches from one brink of collapse to the next, it’s worth trying to identify what we know about the current state of the Atlantic financial crisis that broke in 2008. In summary, I think it is this: the present approaches to dealing with debt will fail until the banks take losses as well. And that needs financial and social innovation.
A weekly roundup of peak oil news, including:
-Oil and the global economy
-Canada
-Japan
-Sabotaging pipelines
-Quote of the week
-Briefs
Since I was a teenager, I frequently heard stories that some guy had invented a car that could get 100 miles per gallon (MPG), but that powerful interests (often GM, Chevron, etc.) had bought rights to the idea and sat on it. We suckers were left to shell out major bucks for gasoline, when a solution was in hand and under wraps. Leaving aside the notion that such a design would bring unbelievable prosperity to its holder (i.e., no real incentive to sit on it), let’s look at what physics says is possible.
Professor, I liked your talk, but I am perplexed. You told us many interesting things about fossil fuels, energy and climate. I can’t avoid noticing that I have heard other scientists arriving to different conclusions. I heard someone saying that people were predicting the end of fossil fuels already 20 years ago and they were wrong, of course, and therefore there is nothing to worry about today. And it is the same about climate; I heard someone saying that scientists were expecting an ice age in the 1970s, and they were wrong, of course. So, I am surprised that experts can have such different positions while, theoretically, they all have the same data.
Today, the Bureau of Economic Analysis released revised figures for the Gross Domestic Product going all the way back to 2007, and they aren’t pretty. The recovery is a failure; the economy is lousy; and the official discourse is in deep, deep denial.
Something truly remarkable is happening in a thousand places all over the world. It is happening in classrooms – university graduate classrooms and Montessori kindergartens, in formal learning sites at venerable institutions and in newer educational sites such as distance learning programs and in impromptu classrooms put together by churches, book clubs and after school programs. It is happening across disciplines – in classrooms teaching hard sciences, of course, but also in the arts, through the lens of history, in writing and business classes. Engineers and poets, philosophers and economists, undergrads and sixth graders – all of them are learning about Peak Oil.
Hope lies in the future. Look at what’s already here. If 61 native nations oppose a tar-sands pipeline, it’s because they’ve survived the last 519 years of Euro-invasive attempts to eliminate their rights, their identities, and sometimes their lives. They’re still here. So are the Immokalee workers. And the feminists. And the climate-change activists. And Nelson Mandela. So are you. Do something hopeful about it, just for the hell of it. There’s no reason not to.
In this year, 2011, we are enjoying a lifestyle beyond the most optimistic dreams of past generations. We are benefitting from the whirlwind of achievements in science and technology during the last hundred years. There has never been a century like the one just passed, and there will never be another like it. Lifestyles will be very different when oil and gas are depleted.
Some time ago an economist with whom I had an extensive exchange suggested that the best way to incentivize an energy transition would be to tax what we don’t want and let the market do the rest. It was really such an elegant approach and an impractical one, I thought.
One of Ireland’s most iconic images, seen in many postcards and calendar panoramas, is the mosaic of green fields divided by stone walls. Those walls, so common in the west of our island, look even more interesting up close, for the stones are loose, irregular and often lain without mortar. They look as unstable as a card pyramid, yet many have lasted centuries. They demonstrate how insoluble problems can be combined into simple solutions, as farmers here turned an obstacle – the stones that broke their ploughs – into a barrier that would protect their livestock.
There is a way in which The Tea Party’s uncompromising stance does make sense. Perhaps they are willing to crash the economy not just or only out of ignorance of basic economics—or basic economics as, importantly, it is articulated by liberal academic economists and Wall Street analysts alike. Perhaps they see this crisis as an opportunity to make their stand against a system that cannot continue along its current path. The path to a sustainable future, they seem to suggest, will involve some changes to our expectations about what we deserve and what we can expect.
We are learning that a warming world means a wetter world. On a planet that is three-quarters covered with liquid water, this should come as no surprise. Historically, floods have been the most devastating of natural disasters, killing more people and causing more damage than fire, earthquake, tornadoes, and volcanic eruptions combined. My own foretaste of warmer-means-wetter came six years ago when I experienced first-hand the effect of three hurricanes in three weeks while living in western North Carolina in a rural ecovillage.
