Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Lester Brown Restoring the earth will take an enormous international effort, one far more demanding than the Marshall Plan that helped rebuild war-torn Europe and Japan after World War II. And such an initiative must be undertaken at wartime speed before environmental deterioration translates into economic decline, just as it did for the Sumerians, the Mayans, and many other early civilizations whose archeological sites we study today.
A midweekly roundup of peak oil news, including:
-Developments this week
One of the lessons of Nassim Taleb’s The Black Swan is that the events that have caused the greatest changes (and collectively most of the substantive change) to our civilization and our way of life were completely unexpected, unpredictable “black swan events. His new book argues that rather than trying to plan and prepare for a future we can’t predict, we should do things that improve our resilience, and create systems that are “anti-fragile”. Unlike most fragile, complicated human-made systems, “anti-fragile” systems (such as evolution and other complex natural systems) actively adapt to, learn from and benefit from upheaval and dramatic change.
I am convinced that the seething cauldron of human thought boils up in the ethereal atmosphere of ideas, a process made more substantive now by electronic communication gone wild, and that more seemingly creative people have taller antennae jutting out from behind their ears to pick up on the latest notions and theories floating around in the great brain hovering over us.
As we have seen with the Bakken and the various natural gas bearing shales we have been drilling of late, it takes an awful lot of expensive wells and environmental disruption to get the oil out. One estimate of the Energy Returned on Energy Investment (EROEI) for the Bakken shale suggests that the EROEI is six. This means that it may take one oil barrel’s worth of energy to produce six barrels of Bakken shale oil. This is getting very close to the theoretical point at which it really is not worth the effort and all the economic disruption.
The aspect of this “energy independence” story that the optimists continue to ignore is that, while oil production from shale may be climbing, depletion of our other sources of oil continues apace
-Saudi Arabia Can Raise Output 25% If Needed, Naimi Says
-Tech Talk – Going Back to the First Look at Saudi Arabian Oil Production
-Saudi Arabia sends tankers to US with pledge to bring down oil price
-FACT CHECK: Does more US drilling ease gas pump pain? Math, history show that hasn’t happened
-Tapping Petroleum Reserve has gotten trickier
-US exempts Japan and EU nations from Iran oil sanctions
-Juliet Schor on Consumption and the Environment
-What Isn’t for Sale?
-The Deadly Scramble for the World’s Last Resources
Strength in numbers! More than 3,600 farmers strong gathered for the Midwest Organic and Sustainable Education Service (MOSES) conference in La Crosse, Wisconsin the last weekend in February, and it was an amazing experience. The conference featured keynotes by food policy expert Margaret Krome and Food Corps director Curt Ellis, a cornucopia of training opportunities focused on all aspects of organic farming, and a special “Young Organic Stewards” track for newcomers and beginning farmers with specialized workshops and social events.
Last Friday, with little publicity, President Obama signed a national preparedness executive order that gives US government (USG) cabinet agencies the ability to exercise total control over what are essentially all the resources of the USA.
In my humble opinion, this could also be the USG’s way of telling us that it knows Peak Oil has arrived, and that the age of energy and resource scarcity has officially begun.
(suggested by an EB reader)
I thought I’d do a thought experiment. Suppose tomorrow morning a hypothetical university—let’s call it T.I.M.—sends out their weekly press release claiming a “revolutionary breakthrough” that will change the way we think about energy. Unlike every other time in the past decade they’ve made this claim, though, suppose this time it’s actually true: they’ve discovered a way of producing extremely cheap energy—as near to “free energy” as can be imagined.
In the last thirty years, a rising share of the global economic pie has been colonised by the world’s rich. It is this concentration of income that is the real cause of the present crisis. It created the conditions for the 2008 Crash and is now driving us into an era of near-permanent slump.
A solar panel reaps only a small portion of its potential due to night, weather, and seasons, simultaneously introducing intermittency so that large-scale storage is required to make solar power work at a large scale. A perennial proposition for surmounting these impediments is that we launch solar collectors into space—where the sun always shines, clouds are impossible, and the tilt of the Earth’s axis is irrelevant.
