Oil prices – Feb 27
– David Strahan: Oil price set to double if production is cut off
– NYT: A Tipping Point for Oil Prices
– Tverberg: WSJ, Financial Times Raise Issue of Oil Prices Causing Recession
Staff
The shores of Tripoli – Feb 27
– Libya celebrates as Gaddafi’s remote strongholds rise against him
– Building a new Libya
– Britain and Libya: “No line in the sand”
– The Vacuum After Qaddafi
Energy – Feb 27
– NYT: Regulation Lax as Gas Wells’ Tainted Water Hits Rivers
– NG industry tried to get “Gasland” doc disqualified from Oscars
– Lower second tier oil producers – Norway, Brazil, Iraq and Algeria
– How the U.S. may win the battery race
– New book from WebHubbleTelescope: “The Oil ConunDRUM”
When the believers stop believing: Chesapeake dumps shale gas assets
Only two years ago Chesapeake Energy Corp. president Aubrey McClendon was telling us about the limitless future of natural gas in North America. It is a good thing that McClendon, who still runs Chesapeake, isn’t taking his own advice these days.
The backyard frontier
This then represents the end of the historical epoch I have chosen to call the Age of Frontiers, which we can date from 1492 to 2006. Although there are still other, smaller frontiers that will continue to be exploited, none is large enough or expanding quickly enough to offset the effects of the closing of the oil frontier. We are in a new age now, one for which we don’t have a map or blueprint, and for which the assumptions about how the world works that we have taken for granted all our lives will be inadequate.
Transition & solutions – Feb 27
– 350.org: Implementing local solutions, one neighborhood at a time.
– Totnes: Britain’s town of the future
– One on One: Jane McGonigal, (Peak Oil) Game Designe
– Will Carbon Nation succeed where An Inconvenient Truth failed?
– Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us (RSA video)
The corn ultimatum
In a world of blatantly increasing food insecurity — driven by population, dietary trends, rising oil prices, and growing climate instability — America’s policy of burning one third of our corn crop in our engines (soon to be 37% or more) is becoming increasingly untenable, if not unconscionable.
Promoting biodiversity stewardship in Darjeeling
Local communities that depend on Darjeeling’s delicate but rich natural environment will either benefit from its preservation or suffer from its degradation. Conservation efforts that ignore economic realities and the role of community institutions miss opportunities to provide incentives for environmental preservation.
ODAC Newsletter – Feb 25
Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi’s threat to fight to the death rather than cede power set off a rising tide of violence this week which has seen hundreds, maybe thousands killed. The future of the regime and the country still hangs in the balance. The growing chaos has also spread to Libya’s oil industry as companies shut down production and foreign workers flee.
Libya and beyond: What’s next for democracy?
Social, political, demographic, and other conditions in Libya are significantly different than in Egypt, Tunisia, Bahrain or elsewhere, so it is not surprising that the progress of the revolution has differed too.
Geometric progressions: What you *will* learn from an oil shock
What we have learned from past oil shocks (which few people outside the peak oil community have chosen to recognize) is pretty clear and simple – that the effect of oil on the economy, on individual lives, on the world as a whole is dramatically greater than can be expected by a direct arithmetical progression – that is, the effect of oil on whole systems is something like a geometric progression, increasing in complexity and impact well beyond what one would intuitively expect.
Announcing Dark Mountain: Issue 2
The point here is not to say “we were right” but simply to underline the central observation with which we launched this project: the world we live in is being turned upside down by a series of converging crises. This process has not finished: it has only just begun, and it’s likely to get faster, deeper, harder. We can choose how to react to it, but there’s no going back.
