Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Gail Tverberg If I were to ask 10 random people what they would expect would be a sign of the arrival of “peak oil”, I would expect that all 10 would say “high oil prices”. Let me tell you what I think the symptoms of the arrival of peak oil are
1. Higher default rates on loans
2. Recession
-How Wrong Is the IPCC?
-Bill Gates: the Most Important Climate Speech of the Year
-Team Finds Subtropical Waters Flushing Through Greenland Fjord
-Oil firms drop group lobbying for US climate bill
What would happen if the unthinkable would happen? Author Edwin Black’s threatens not with a slow run-of-the-mill peak oil scenario, but rather an acute (perhaps terrorist-induced?) fuel crisis because of reduced global availability of oil by 5-10% for a period of least a month. Black then goes on to propose A Plan for how the U.S. could cope with such a disaster in his book “The Plan: How to rescue society when the oil stops – or the day before” (2008).
With any reasonably successful blog, you have a conversation going on, often between an author and commenters who have a long history and background, and people coming into the conversation for the first time…Balancing the degree to which you write for the regulars and to those new to you is always an interesting exercise.
When I think about dyed-in-the-wool, dystopian End-of-the-Worlders, MarketWatch’s Paul Farrell does not come to mind. I think of Club Orlov and its Honorary Members, people like Jim Kunstler or others in the Club who I have talked to in the past.
Monday night I was having drinks in downtown San Francisco with some seriously smart people—top-level IBM scientists and strategists involved in Big Blue’s Smarter Planet initiative. Given the room’s collective interest in creating smart electrical grids, smart water systems, advanced electric car batteries and other green technologies, the talk naturally turned to how to create sustainable cities.
An Olympian game of musical chairs in global finance heads for a climax in the days ahead as so many eyes are diverted to alternate festivities in British Columbia, where grown men compete for gold by riding things that look like cafeteria trays down icy mountainsides — is this the moment that comes every four years when you wonder why you didn’t get your kid a luge for Christmas?
-Even Boulder Finds It Isn’t Easy Going Green
-Ecocities Emerging Newsletter
-The Cleveland Model
-De-Industrializing the City
-Urban Form, Behavior Energy Modeling in China: Sim City for Real?
-Beyond “Green Capitalism”
-The zero point of systemic collapse
-Tending the Garden of Technology
-Power
This, then, should be the new main thrust of industrial activity: to manufacture and distribute products with the understanding that this process will run out of resources and stop. These products must be designed to outlive the process by which they are made, by as long as possible.
The world is immensely complicated, and the forces of sweeping change may overall boost transition towns for their positive contribution. Or as Ted Trainer lays out below, a course correction is needed now.
President Obama has issued marching orders for the rapid national adoption of “clean coal” technology. Last week, shortly after his budget address, he ordered a high-level task force to deliver a plan within 180 days determining how “to overcome barriers to the widespread, cost-effective deployment of CCS within 10 years, with the goal of bringing 5 to 10 commercial demonstration projects on line by 2016.”
