Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
The world is doomed to repeat four-year cycles of booms followed by crashes if we don’t get off oil, Jeremy Rifkin warned a Climate One audience in San Francisco on October 3. The solution, what he calls the Third Industrial Revolution, is the “Energy Internet,” a nervous system linking millions of small renewable energy producers.
You may be already driving less, recycling and using your own grocery bags, but what bigger-picture actions will it take to save our planet? An interview with Gernot Wagner, economist at the Environmental Defense Fund and author of the new book “But Will the Planet Notice?: How Smart Economics Can Save the World”.
A weekly roundup of peak oil news, including:
-Oil and the global economy
-The EU’s financial crisis
-The Middle East
-The sands of Alberta
-Quote of the week
-Briefs
As we previously forecast, the decline in world oil production is likely to occur in the next 1-4 years, a year having passed since we forecast 2-5 years. Some believe that weak worldwide economic conditions will significantly extend the onset of decline. We believe that the delay will be essentially negligible.
Deepening political anxiety about the economic crisis went public this week as Mervyn King, Governor of the Bank of England declared that “this is the most serious financial crisis at least since the 1930s, if not ever.” and David Cameron in his keynote speech to the Conservative Party Conference admitted that “the threat to the world economy – and to Britain – is as serious today as it was in 2008 when world recession loomed.”
A midweekly roundup of peak oil news, including:
-Developments this week
I received an interesting comment today on my first post on the renewable revolution. In answering it, I thought that the exchange was worth publishing as a post in its own, so here it is.
Daniel Yergin, whom the media have consistently designated as one of the world’s premier experts on energy matters–and who has a consistent track record of predicting higher oil production levels–has been very visible of late, especially with a in the Wall Street Journal, focused on why concerns about Peak Oil are misplaced. I thought that it would be useful to review how some of Mr. Yergin’s prior predictions regarding oil prices, production and exports in the 2004/2005 time frame have turned out, now that we have several years of post-2005 price, production and export data. Following is a brief summary.
A midweekly roundup of peak oil news, including:
-Developments this week
The history of energy use in human civilisation is generally summarised as follows: from Antiquity until the start of the Industrial Revolution, people made use of the manual labour of both animals and humans, as well as biomass, sun, water and wind. Next, all these renewable energy sources were replaced by fossil fuels: first coal, and later oil and gas. Uranium completed the picture in the second half of the twentieth century. While this historical summary is basically correct, there were some – rather important – exceptions. Almost all of the Western European economies during the last millenium relied on a large-scale use of fossil fuels such as peat and coal.
Heinberg believes our decades-long era of growth was based on aberrant set of conditions- namely cheap oil, but also cheap minerals, cheap food, etc- and that looking ahead, we need to prepare for a “new normal”. This is not all theoretical. In the backyard of the home Heinberg shares with his wife, Janet Barocco, the couple grow most of their food during the summer months (i.e. 25 fruit & nut trees, veggies, potatoes.. they’re just lack grains), raise chickens for eggs, capture rainwater, bake with solar cookers and a solar food drier and secure energy with photovoltaic and solar hot water panels.
Their backyard reflects Heinberg’s vision for our “new normal” and it’s full of experiments.
Unless and until adaptive responses are large and fast enough to constrain the upward trend of oil prices, the primary adaptive response will be periodic economic crashes of a magnitude that depresses oil consumption and oil prices. These have the effect of shifting consumption from incumbent consumers—the advanced economies—to the new consumers in the developing economies.
