Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Randy Udall Against the backdrop of widespread economic carnage, the fact that global oil production likely peaked last summer seems almost irrelevant. The prevailing meme has long been that since oil created prosperity, peak oil would devastate it-but derivatives launched a pre-emptive strike.
Heirloom Design
Collapse Forward
Can the West cultivate ideas from Cuba’s ‘Special Period’?
Maintaining spiritual wholeness as the economy and political order come apart (video)
The Atlantic: The quiet coup
Too big to fail?
Comparing the U.S. to Russia and Argentina
Matt Taibbi on why financial institutions should be broken up
Taibbi: The big takeover
Matt Simmons sees oil shock from credit crunch
Kurt Cobb: Is thorium an energy alchemist’s dream?
Energy pundits duke it out at Aspen Institute
Social critic James Kunstler offers a decidedly darker view
CBC on peak oil, Transition Town Totnes and Robert Hirsch
Jeff Rubin: Oil scarcity will spell end of globalisation
G20 protesters go on the march in London
From Edinburgh to Paris to Kiev, Europe is revolting
G20 protesters produce spoof Financial Times
Wallace and Gromit tout energy efficiency
Anti-globalization group circulates faked German newspaper from 2010
One thing that becomes apparent as one peruses the peak oil preparation sites is that there is no clear line between a doomer and a sensible person thinking about preparations for a post-peak oil world.
Future Scenarios serves as a good introduction to the concept of future energy descent/climate change scenarios.
I am a banker. I’ve been financing projects in the energy sector for close to 15 years. … Banking has always been both a utility and a casino. … there needs to be a separation once again between the utility bits of banking, and the speculative bits. Both are – or at least, can be – useful, but only one is absolutely necessary, and that fact (the absolute need for a sound basic banking system) cannot and should be hijacked to protect the speculators from the consequences of their bets.
I have had 37 years in the oil industry. I was CEO of a large company for the last 16 years and I have just retired. … I would make the following observations: there are virtually no unexplored basins in the world. The ones that there are might be in the Arctic, and that illustrates the point quite neatly because it is obviously really difficult to get that.
Academic public health is ensconced in an institutional matrix of growth. It owes much of its existence to the socioeconomic expansion petroleum facilitated during the 20th century. … The best option I see for academic public health is to reorganize itself around the question: “If growth and economic development as they have been understood are no longer possible, then what kind of public health system is sustainable?”
The Secretary of Synthetic Biology
Washington County puts its energy into saving energy
Leaving PCs on overnight costs companies $2.8B a year
Greenwash: Shell betrays ‘new energy future’ promises
Rise In Frugality Leads To Drop In Trash Collection
SXSW FILM: Garbage Dreams
Large agriculture operations add billions to our economy but what price are we paying?
