The Prosthetic Imagination
Two news stories and an op-ed piece in the media in recent days provide a useful introduction to the theme of this week’s post here on The Archdruid Report.
John Michael Greer
The oil glut and low prices reflect an affordability problem
For a long time, there has been a belief that the decline in oil supply will come by way of high oil prices. Demand will exceed supply. It seems to me that this view is backward–the decline in supply will come through low oil prices.
ExxonMobil CEO Wrong About āResilienceā of Tight Oil Production
ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson is wrong about the resilience of U.S. tight oil production.
The Science of Peak Oil
One of the many barbs often pointed at peak oil proponents is that they are constantly shifting the goal posts. Peak oilers are accused of changing the definition of what peak oil actually means, therefore the entire concept of oil production peaking is rubbish. Far from a valid criticism however, this is actually a scientific virtue.
A review of James Kunstlerās The Long Emergency 10 years later
When James Howard Kunstlerās The Long Emergency came out in 2005, it was at once terrifying and riveting, like a nightmare whose outcome must be discovered despite the difficulty of braving through it.
Peak Meaninglessness
Last week’s discussion of externalities—costs of doing business that get dumped onto the economy, the community, or the environment, so that those doing the dumping can make a bigger profit—is, I’m glad to say, not the first time this issue has been raised recently.
Oil Prices Donāt Change Because of Rig Count
Oil prices don’t change based on weekly rig count reports. Yet every week, there are proclamations by analysts that oil prices are poised to recover because of some change in the Baker Hughes North American rig count
The Externality Trap, or, How Progress Commits Suicide
Economic life in the industrial world these days can be described, without too much inaccuracy, as an arrangement set up to allow a privileged minority to externalize nearly all their costs onto the rest of society while pocketing as much as possible the benefits themselves.
Ownership & Business Models as Social & Ideological Battlefields
The creation of what we now call capitalism, with its deification of private property and free…markets, has been a conscious project spanning a number of centuries.
What Progress Means
Strictly speaking, therefore, nothing requires the project of deliberate technological regress to move in lockstep to the technologies of a specific past date and stay there.
Conflicts in the food, energy, land and water nexus
Shortage of one resource (land) can partly be compensated with another (water), but what happens if all of them are scarce? We see today that the market does not distribute scarce resources to those who are poor: if resources become scarcer the poor will be further disenfranchised. In more extreme cases the rich will drive their cars with fuels made from food crops that the poor cannot afford to buy and lack the resources to produce themselves.
The Problem With An Undulating Trend And Natural Variability
Humans find it very hard to identify a trend that is affected by natural variability, instead getting caught up in short term variations like the "Climate Pause". This may have disabled humanity’s urgency in taking a sustainable path,
