William Ryerson

On the death of Matthew Simmons

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In the days following Simmon’s death some 400 obituaries appeared on the web, on television broadcasts and in hard copy publications around the world. Some of these were written by people and organizations who understand the threat of peaking world oil supplies and praised Matt for his leadership in analyzing and publicizing the issue. Others were written by hostile skeptics who sought to play down his significance or focused on those instances in his voluminous pronouncements where he was wrong.

OPEC’s spare crude oil capacity – will it disappear by the end of 2011?

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In this post I present an analysis of how OPEC oil supplies have responded to changes in crude oil prices during the last 10 years. My objective was to estimate OPEC’s probable marketable crude oil capacities as of May 2010, based on responses of OPEC oil supplies to price changes.

Message from from a devastated Ladakh

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Early in the morning of August 6th an unusually strong thunderstorm hit Ladakh, a remote Himalayan region in the Indian state of Jammu-Kashmir on the western edge of the Tibetan plateau. Ladakh is normally one of the driest inhabited areas in the world – a region unaccustomed to heavy rains. When the intense cloudburst hit early on the morning of the 6th, the impact was especially severe. The storm caused massive flash flooding that left over one hundred dead and many more missing.

Economics as if people mattered

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Robert Costanza is professor of ecological economics at the University of Vermont and director of the Gund Institute of Ecological Economics. He talks about the things most economists overlook, like the fact that growth can’t continue forever on a finite planet, and the ways our well-being is not connected with how much money we have.

When truth is unbelievable

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As a college junior I frequented a website (www.dieoff.org) where prognosticators observed that with accelerating rates of environmental destruction, overpopulation and fossil fuel depletion, modern civilization was on the verge of collapse. I kept my new-found realization that life as we knew it was coming an end to myself, for fear of being labeled a “Cassandra.” Only that’s exactly what I would soon become.

The failure of networked systems: The repercussions of systematic risk revisited

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There are those among the Peak Oil community who suspect that we could be facing a failure of our interdependent society that may be sudden, profound, and complete. I have repeatedly said that I am not numbered among them. My opinion is that our way of life will have to change significantly, but slowly. I don’t expect to be clubbing anybody with a femur in any foreseeable future. This opinion is on record in both print and electronic media, and I don’t expect to be issuing a retraction any time soon–but a recent event forced me to admit that I may have to hedge a little.

The Transition of Appalachia

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The economic model of globalization has propelled rural communities in the United States and much of the world toward specialized, low-value, extractive economies for much of the twentieth century. This has been particularly true in the central Appalachian region of the U.S., where relatively diverse and self-reliant communities have gradually given way to increased dependence on external resources and greater extremes of poverty, wealth concentration, economic vulnerability, and ecological decline.

Die Post Carbon Reader Serie: Grundlegende Konzepte

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This is a German translation of the essay Beyond the Limits to Growth by Richard Heinberg which will appear in the forthcoming Post Carbon Reader. Im Jahre 1972 erkundete das inzwischen klassische Buch “Grenzen des Wachstums” die Konsequenzen des exponentiellen Wachstums von Bevölkerung, Industrialisierung, Umweltverschmutzung und Ressourcenverbrauch.# Dieses Buch, bis heute unangetastet der Bestseller unter den Umweltbüchern, berichtete über die ersten Versuche, Computer zur Modellierung der Trends bei den Interaktionen von Ressourcen, Verbrauch und Bevölkerung zu nutzen.

The dilemma of poverty in the South: equity or transformation

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The Transition Movement in the ‘West’ (and therefore North) has for the most part been unable to conceptualise a response to the human development and social justice needs of the South. Much of this lack has to do with the very formidable inertness which western societies inherited from the transformations wrought by the Industrial Revolution, and the apparently incontrovertible ideas of ‘progress’ and ‘growth.’