Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Tina Clarke Sometimes, if we step back to think about all of the challenges, we get a little overwhelmed. How do you transition a street, and a neighborhood, in an American city of great extremes between the wealthy and the poor?
While awareness of peak oil has advanced light years since ODAC was founded over a decade ago, on the evidence of this week the same cannot be said for the conduct of British energy policy. Back in 2000, Tony Blair’s government was blindsided by petrol protests that brought the country to a standstill in 48 hours. Mr Blair bore the scars, and while there was much to criticise in New Labour’s energy policy—not least the invasion of Iraq—he developed emergency plans and did not allow a serious recurrence…
(Capitalism) has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, that it is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells (Karl Marx)
With global warming driving down the demand for natural gas as a home heating fuel and natural gas drillers producing record amounts, an oversupply situation has developed quickly. Stocks of natural gas are rising. As a result natural gas prices have fallen way below profitability and drillers are scrambling to cut back production.
There’s a fascinating parallel between the rise of America’s first overseas empire and the emergence of her petroleum industry. The age of oil, in fact, can be seen as an empire of time — the exploitation of the distant past for the benefit of the present — just as empire in the usual sense is an empire of space, the exploitation of distant countries for the benefit of one imperial nation. The two patterns would emerge together to drive a new mode of imperial expansion — one with a sharply limited shelf life.
There is no business itch too trivial for the British Chancellor George Osborne not to want to scratch it, no matter what the other consequences. So perhaps it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the sustained lobbying by not one but two separate Heathrow expansion campaigns has got Osborne, or so it’s claimed, lobbying his Cabinet colleagues on a change of mind on Heathrow’s third runway. I’ve written here before…about the long-term trends influencing aviation in the rich world. My assessment then was that most of them pointed to a decline in demand for long-haul flight (and in Europe and the United States, probably short-haul as well). So it’s probably worth spending some time on the “studies” which support the latest political mood music emanating from Number 11.
The Collapse of Complex Societies is a useful book. Its model seems valid enough to me, and it contains a wealth of historical background. But I think most readers of this site already have a good idea where this society is headed. For the kind of wisdom that might point to renewal — towards which we still have to work, even if it happens long after we’re gone — we need to look elsewhere.
‘Mobiliser la société face au pic pétrolier’ is a call to French Presidential candidates inviting them to mobilise society in the face of peak oil. It has been signed by renonwed French oil specialists and published in LeMonde.fr. The group is also calling for signatures for their petition.
A midweekly roundup of peak oil news, including:
-Developments this week
The Atmos Totnes campaign, which is seeking to bring the town’s former Dairy Crest site into community ownership, and its vision of the site as ‘the heart of a new economy’, are at the cutting edge of thinking about the economy of the future. At least, that was the opinion of many of the delegates at the Social Enterprise Exchange in Glasgow, the world’s biggest social enterprise event.
Why does Sennett, a professor both at New York University and the London School of Economics, see Britain, not America, as the new homeland for the social left? Ironically enough, he pointed to our language, much mocked by Americans for its stumbling timidity. We Brits are much better, it seems, at ‘subjunctive expression’, one of the three key co-operative skills…While Americans are experts at declarative expression (“I believe X, Y and Z”), the British with our “perhaps”, “I think”, “it might be” create a space for communication that in turn encourages the second ‘dialogic’ skill: that of listening not to the words, but the intention behind them. The third co-operative skill singled out as key is the ability to empathise.
-Saudi Arabia will act to lower soaring oil prices
-Saudi Arabia resorts to Jedi mindtricks
-Saudi Arabia: Paper Tiger?
