Year: 2012

Oil prices

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It’s worth a comment on oil prices which have been collapsing with remarkable speed lately. Firstly, let’s briefly recap the price history of the last five years, which I have divided into eight eras…

Emergency action plan for New Zealanders (and others)

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We believe that New Zealand, like all other countries, is about to enter a period of extended crisis. The severity and timing of the events that will unfold are uncertain, but the likelihood of major change is increasingly hard to refute.

We offer this list as a starting point for considering what strategies will best meet the challenges ahead, and invite the input of all concerned people to an ongoing conversation.

Unexpected bounty – Beauty plums

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I had almost given up on my Beauty plum tree. I ordered this Japanese variety from Burnt Ridge Nursery and planted it five years ago. For the last two years, it has been covered with fruit, until the week when every single plum fell off before ripening. This year, I gave up and did not even bother to thin the plums, knowing that the effort was pointless.

Yes, the plums ripened last week!

Commentary: Why doesn’t the UN take peak oil into account?

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In thousands of ways, UN policy helps shape how we respond to emerging crises, from basic poverty to world political events, from food to climate change and population. What is emerging, however, is that UN analyses are increasingly diverging from reality – as they attempt to describe our future, they have failed to adequately (or at all) take into account that most basic of all considerations, material limits on energy resources.

Why bargains are bad

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Bargain-hunting has become a cultural obsession (my father in law, bless him, used to drive a good way across town so he could buy day-old bread that a flyer had promised was a nickel a loaf cheaper; my neighbor trolls the Internet for wine a dollar cheaper, or a lawnmower he can get for a hundreds buck off — whether or not he needs another lawnmower). Thrift hasn’t disappeared; it just mutated into the endless search for cheaper stuff.

Thinking in miracles

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I saw this cartoon in a comment on a post about optimistic oil supply projections at the oil analysis site The Oil Drum — which is must-visit if you are interested in the future — a rich cluster of technical experts clustered around a single blog. It was relevant to the post — broadly, the projections being critiqued needed good fortune pretty much everywhere, and not a single instance of bad luck — but it also made me think of the role of miracles in futures analysis.

Time for a Real Jubilee

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I am not sure whether the coincidence of the next critical phase in the global credit crisis with the celebration of the Queen’s jubilee is ironic or tragic, but it certainly gives me an opportunity to explore the real roots of the concept of jubilee, a concept whose real meaning could not be further from the spectacle of disempowered British citizens, burdened with the debts of their unaccountable elite, paying homage to the figurehead of the system of unequal power and property relations that oppresses them.

Give me that doom time religion

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The Age of Limits conference held at the end of May offered some new insights on how religion, as an organized institution, could play a key role in helping mitigate the collapse that the conferences speakers think has already hit many parts of the world, including much of the U.S.

Though at this event, neither religion nor collapse were what they used to be.

The other side of the peak

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This is a written version of the talk that I gave at the “ASPO-2012” meeting in Vienna, on May 31 2012. It describes my experience with waste management as a way of closing the industrial cycle and attaining long term sustainability. Here, I introduce the concept of “urban gleaning”, a high efficiency way of dealing with waste.

Denying the climate

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-The Planet Wreckers
-Top US companies shelling out to block action on climate change
-North Carolina Wishes Away Climate Change
-A cold climate in the arts world