Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Stephanie Ogburn Modern agriculture — and, consequently, present-day human society — depends on the widespread availability of cheap nitrogen fertilizer, the ingredient that makes our high-yielding food system possible. But the industrialization of this synthetic nitrogen fertilizer has come with costs.
In a busy week for energy policy, UK energy watchdog Ofgem finally acknowledged what has been obvious for years: that liberalized markets cannot deliver energy security in the era of carbon reduction and resource depletion.
I have found solace in the words of Dmitry Orlov and many others, and there are two reasons for this. One is that the voices of truth relieve our anxiety that the liars are right and we are crazy. The truth, however awful, is safe and real. The other reason we can embrace the truth is that it allows us to move past denial into action.
One way of looking at our current set of predicaments is that we’ve been on a binge, consuming energy considerably faster than it can be captured and stored by Earth’s ecosystems. While fossil fuels once appeared limitless (and still do to deniers of peak oil), and though we’re literally bathed in energy (in the form of sunlight), the disappearance of the fossil-fuel storehouse accumulated over millions of years isn’t something that can be replaced with anything nearly as convenient as fossil fuels.
According to In Defense of Food author Michael Pollan, “…the advent of “nutritionism” has vastly complicated how Americans see food, without doing very much for our health. Nutritionism arose to deal with genuine issues – addressing chronic diseases such as obesity, diabetes and many cancers – but now seems to be obscuring and perpetuating the real problems of the American diet”, says Pollan. This program was recorded in front of a live audience at the Commonwealth Club of California on January 27, 2010.
For decades now, those concerned with the future of the industrial world have warned that a point would come, sooner or later, when the consequences of all that short-term thinking would begin coming home to roost. For the United States, that point might be arriving now.
It is a strange moment when you see an once cutting edge technology die. Of course, the common wisdom of our age – the so-called myth of progress – claims it cannot happen. Technologies may be made obsolete, they can turn out to be impasses, but it is unthinkable for a whole avenue of progress to simply close down. That is exactly what has happened, however, when President Obama canceled the Constellation Program, and that tells a lot about the fate of technology in a energy poor future.
For many years I could not understand why the sound of singing hens soothed me so much. Hen song is hardly melodic, being composed of two or three notes at most. It is plaintive in fact, a far cry from the bubbling warble of a bluebird or the soaring lilt of a meadowlark. Hen song is plainsong, equivalent to the way any of us might hum our way through the humble chores of daily life.
-How long before the lights go out?
-Peak Oil Theory: implications for Australia’s strategic outlook and the ADF
-The Iraqi Oil Conundrum
-A New Clean Economy — With Old Sources of Energy
-Business as Usual: Hooked on Foreign Oil
-Stop the Green Tech Coup, Military Industry on the Offensive
-Citizen Renaissance
-TN green crusader puts ecovillage message to work worldwide
-The Case for ‘Gray Power’
Peter Tertzakian has a double education in geophysics and economics and is “Chief Energy Economist” at a Canadian energy investment company. His book “A Thousand Barrels a Second: The Coming Oil Breakpoint and Challenges facing an energy dependent world” was published in 2007, but was, based on the contents of the book, presumably written up around 2005.
Mr. Gabrielli, the CEO of Petrobras, gave a presentation in December 2009 in which he shows world oil capacity, including biofuels, peaking in 2010 due to oil capacity additions from new projects being unable to offset world oil decline rates.
