Staff

Energy: Making sense of peak oil and energy uncertainty

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There are currently no viable substitutes for oil at current rates of consumption.  Although alternatives to oil do exist for many of its uses, they are generally vastly inferior to oil in their energy content and in the ease of which they can be extracted, transported, and turned into a commercially-useable fuel.

Transition and “activism’s” edge

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I don’t think we’re really going to understand this friction between, and the potential energy arising from, transition and “activism/action” unless the latter term gets further granularity. “Transition justice” is a new term and probably means different things to everyone. How this gets woven explicitly into the framing of Transition is a question we’ve not answered yet. But at least we’re asking that question.

OPEC spare capacity, rig count and the big picture

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There has been much speculation on these blog pages about the existence of OPEC spare capacity. The oil rig count for Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Abu Dhabi and Qatar (SKAQ) provides some clues. The sharp rise in operational oil rigs in February 2011 suggests to us that usable spare capacity does not exist and that new useful capacity (light sweet?) must be built by drilling new wells. This takes time. It also suggests that there is goodwill among these OPEC members to try and boost supply to tame oil prices.

Bigger farms, bigger headaches

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It took three 150 hp plus tractors, two backhoes and a bulldozer to finally free the rig. In the process three pull chains, each with 55,000 pound pulling capacity, snapped in one awesome surge of assembled horsepower. The country road alongside the field looked like a superhighway as the local population drove by to enjoy the show.

Can biomass help phase out coal?

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If biomass can help power plant owners ease away from coal faster, that is certainly a good thing. The Dominion announcement is particularly relevant given the number of planned plant retirements in the coal industry – there are currently 190 generators around the U.S. set to be shut down, and there’s a dwindling appetite to replace them with more coal.

How not to play the game

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A very large fraction of the alternative energy projects being proposed these days are large, expensive, and designed to perpetuate the specific technological and economic forms of the present. A very large fraction of the equivalent projects envisioned and tested during the energy crisis of the Seventies, by contrast, were small, cheap, and presupposed a significantly different way of dealing with concepts of energy, technology and wealth. The former may be more popular just now but the latter have much more to offer in the future into which our present actions are backing us.

Reducing food waste: Making the most of our abundance

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According to staggering new statistics from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), roughly one-third of the food produced worldwide for human consumption is lost or wasted, amounting to some 1.3 billion tons per year. In the developing world, over 40 percent of food losses occur after harvest—while being stored or transported, and during processing and packing. In industrialized countries, more than 40 percent of losses occur as a result of retailers and consumers discarding unwanted but often perfectly edible food.

Cereals, agroforestry and droughts: an interview with Martin Crawford

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Yields from arable crops in the East of the country, (which is where the main arable crops like wheat are grown in this country), are going to be down by at least 25% and maybe more, because the damage has been done. It can’t be recovered – it’s too late for that now. It’s not all fine now and it really shows that a spring like this, which seems to be becoming the norm…..for the last four years we’ve had pretty dry springs – not as dry as this one but it seems to be becoming a pattern.

Guardians, traders, and public policy

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Here’s a thought. One way into several of the policy issues dominating British news headlines — from the future of the national health service, to the Southern Cross catastrophe, to the funding of higher education — is to look at them through the lens of Jane Jacobs’ distinction, in her book Systems of Survival, between systems based on territory (“guardians”) and systems based on exchange (“traders”). Most human societies need both. But when we get the distinctions between them blurred, breakdown and corruption follows.