Tom Whipple

Peak Oil: The Eventual End of the Oil Age

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We cannot be lulled into a false sense of security: though oil prices have declined from their historic highs, there is little doubt that peak oil is real. A 2008 research project completed at Washington University in St. Louis found strong evidence in support of the theory. Please feel free to circulate this academic document as a primer on peak oil.

Peak Ego and the Ego Descent Plan

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It is logical to speak of peak ego, since cheap oil gave rise to affluence which in turn gave rise to more separation, separation in the meaning that affluence has offered us NOT to need each other the way tribal communities in the past did. Instead we have a lifestyle that separates us from the inherent wisdom of interdependence. When we have reached the ultimate separation perhaps we have reached peak ego. How much more ego can we have before the level of ‘happiness’ runs out?

Ordinary fears/extraordinary times: 55 (real) things to worry about (if you must…)

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Peak Oil, Climate change and the Greater Depression will pose many challenges to our way of life but let’s get real, for a moment: Golden Hordes aren’t one of them. At least not now. Economic depression brings with it a host of serious problems, and I think you can say quite confidently, without being a chicken little, that most of the world is in a Greater Depression.

In Defense of Sustainable Business

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Unless and until we mobilize a mass movement to take down and transform the U.S. legal, political and economic systems upholding the fiction that corporations possess the same constitutional rights as individuals, along with other hallmarks of corporate power, it is fruitless to blame green consumers for the failure to spur large-scale meaningful change.

Peak Oil, the Decline of the North Sea and Britain’s Energy Future (report excerpt)

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The central message of the presentation is that Britain – irrespective of the ramifications of the global issue of peak energy – faces a series of problematic choices in order to re-negotiate our lifestyle within the biophysical limits that will assert themselves over the next few decades. These problems cannot be avoided, and they are complex because they affect so many aspects of our economic, social and material well-being today. For that reason they are innately political, and thus require the political parties of Britain to engage with these issues in order to map out a means of dealing with the crises these changes will generate.

Bottleneck by William Catton – A Review

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First I should confess to a strong bias toward the content of this book. As readers of my blog, Question Everything, will realize, I have been moving inexorably toward the same conclusion as the author, so you will perhaps forgive me if you think I may be suffering from a lack of sufficient critical thinking. Put bluntly, I think this is a book every thinking human being should read, and then consider for themselves.