Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
A lot of what I write works from the assumption that we all agree that peak oil and climate change are happening and going to be life-changing events. And yet, some people who read this blog don’t necessarily agree on this subject, or they don’t see the effects has being as profound as I do, or perhaps the idea of peak oil or climate change is fairly new to them, and they don’t know what to believe.
Farmers are invisible people, and middle-class city dwellers choose to pretend that the long lines of trucks bringing food into the city at dawn every day have nothing to do with the white-collar world. Perhaps it is a mark of the civilized person to believe that the essentials of food, clothing, and shelter have no relevance to daily life. Yet if the farmers stopped sending food into the great vacuum of the metropolis, the great maw of urbanity, the city would soon start to crumble, as Britain discovered in the year 2000 [5]. The next question, then, is: Where does all this food come from?
-Environmentalists question coal’s place in Obama policy
-The Dirty Truth Behind Clean Coal
-Parsing fact from fiction with the Bloom Energy box
The United States apparently has reached the point where it must either accept that Iran will develop nuclear weapons at some point if it wishes, or take military action to prevent this. There is a third strategy, however: Washington can seek to redefine the Iranian question. As we have no idea what leaders on either side are thinking, exploring this represents an exercise in geopolitical theory. Let’s begin with the two apparent stark choices.
Björn Forsberg writes about the fundamental and unavoidable conflict between the environment and the (growth-based) economy in “The last days of economic growth: Green clash over worldviews” (2007). His basic tenet is simple – it is impossible to win legitimacy for any measures that threaten economic growth, are financially burdensome, require sacrifices or are perceived as troublesome for the individual.
With each passing day, it is becoming increasingly likely that the future of our gasoline prices and consequently our economic well-being over the next few years will be determined by what happens with China’s economy.
-What the Olympics Can Teach Us About the Price of Gas
-Pickens expects approval of key natural gas plan
-Asia buys record volume of W.African oil in Q1
-Russia February Output Nears Post-Soviet Record on TNK-BP
-RBS accused over funding for tar sands ‘blood oil’
-Consumerism ‘doomed’, investment forum told
-A Titanic Budget in an Ocean of Icebergs
-Growth and Consumerism: Nature or Nurture?
A weekly roundup of peak oil news, including:
-Prices and production
-Looming electricity shortages
-China’s macro control
-Quote of the week
-Briefs
Here is Part Two of an interview I did with Tim Kasser a couple of weeks ago while he was at Schumacher College. He is a psychologist, author of the seminal High Price of Materialism, as well as other useful writings such as a great chapter in the State of the World Report 2009 about consumerism and climate change. The interview raises some fascinating areas for research and thoughts about Transition and psychology, and I think you’re going to enjoy this one….
One of the authors of Limits to Growth, talks about growth, peak oil, and the possibility of collapse at the World Resources Forum. He says: “The current growth in population and in material use cannot continue–absolutely, with 100% probability, that it is going to stop. When? How? How seriously? We have no scientific way to make predictions. The longer we wait to do social measures, like birth control, or voluntary simplicity, the more likely it will be that physical measures will cause this decline.”
The oil supply challenge is often summarized in terms of the production volume equivalent of Saudi-Arabia’s that needs to be replaced. This popular metric is based on in-depth studies of global decline rates that show a decline range between 4.5 and 6 percent over the current 73 million barrels of crude oil produced per day.
