Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Trevor Malkinson There’s a lot going on in the TV show The Walking Dead that’s worthy of comment, but there’s one aspect of the show that has struck me in particular- that the civilization we’ve built and have come to depend on, could be undermined in short order, returning us quickly to a survivalist state of nature.
West Texas Intermediate crude oil, which had been selling for $105 a barrel at the end of March, fell to $80 a barrel last week, while Brent has come from $125 down to near $90. These price declines will translate into substantial savings for U.S. consumers in the weeks ahead.
Americans are reading, almost on a daily basis, about increasing oil and gas production in the US. For example, Daniel Yergin wrote about his optimistic outlook for increasing US oil and gas production in an OpEd piece in the June 10, 1012 New York Times entitled “Americas New Energy Reality.”
It’s certainly true that US oil and gas production has rebounded from the production low following the 2005 Gulf of Mexico hurricanes, but a careful analysis of the production data suggests that the production outlook it not quite as rosy as most people seem to believe.
Every week another article comes out arguing that peak oil is dead and that we are in a new era of liquid fuel abundance. In the first of a series Andrew McKay takes on the authors of these overly optimistic puff pieces and explains paragraph by paragraph exactly why these people are so wrong.
This inclination apparently is what constitutes a proof of being human, a faculty like the possession of language that distinguishes man from insect, guinea hen, and ape. In the beginning was the word, and with it the powers of enchantment. I take my cue from Christopher Marlowe’s tragical drama Doctor Faustus because his dreams of "profit and delight,/Of power, of honor, of omnipotence," are the stuff that America is made of, as was both the consequence to be expected and the consummation devoutly to be wished when America was formed in the alembic of the Elizabethan imagination.
– Adapting to the New Normal (when disasters are common)
– Financial System Supply-Chain Cross-Contagion:a study in global systemic collapse (Feasta)
– Zombie Politics and the Walking Dead
– Notes From “Oil Supply And Demand Symposium, New York City”
– The Folly of Energy Independence
– The European Refining Blues
– As Rock Phosphate Runs Out, What is More Important – Food Crops or Fuel Crops?
– Zoning and the Transition Movement (article in American Planning Association journal)
– Happiness is a glass half empty
– InfraInput – A Website for Users to Report on Infrastructure
– Al Jazeera interviews Hopkins and Heinberg on sustainability and Rio+20
– Sharon Astyk: Yet Another Last Chance to Step Up that We Blew…Ho Hum
– The Shifting Boundaries of Sustainability Science: Are We Doomed Yet? (3 articles on sustainability in PLoS journal of biology)
– New book: Planetary Sustainability Plan in “The Blueprint: Averting Global Collapse”
The modern end-of-the-world imagination often seeks out great Hollywood-style cataclysms: an asteroid collision, all-out nuclear war, a solar flare that wipes out the electrical grid, even a worldwide epidemic that leaves few alive. Less compelling is the possibility of relentlessly rising death rates that finally overwhelm birth rates and quietly set worldwide population on a downward path.
For Energy Bulletin, this article should be titled, “The REAL Reason Cornucopians Always Win.” The author is a former associate of George Lakoff, and shares his commitment to analyzing framing and political discourse. He writes:
“Progressives need to engage in a values-based strategy that builds trust across the issue silos. We need to focus on building communities of shared identity that bind us together.”
In a more rational world, political leaders might come together in a special forum to acknowledge the nature and severity of the crisis and to establish the institutional and procedural basis for a worldwide “Survival 2100” project.
