Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
One of my favorite sources of rules of thumb is thermodynamics. It doesn’t tell you how to do things, or how fast you can do them, but it tells you whether something, like running your car on water, is impossible.
This past week at the Transition Network Conference 2010 in the UK, the speaker Stoneleigh rocked everyone’s paradigm with her talk “Making Sense of the Financial Crisis in the Era of Peak Oil”.
People in the Dark Ages filled in the gaps in the very limited knowledge base available to them with the help of wizards and soothsayers. As we close in on a future for which most people are hopelessly unprepared, a new kind of wizard — a green wizard, adept in the forgotten arts of appropriate tech — may be one of the things that a deindustrializing world needs most.
Josh Fox’s film Gasland has stirred up a lot of controversy over the environmental damage caused by shale gas drilling. Shale gas reservoir rock lies many thousands of feet below the surface, with the depth depending on the location. In order to get the gas to flow up to the wellhead, operators drill down to the shale rock layer, and then apply a process called hydraulic fracturing to “open up” the rock.
An agriculture student from a small North Indian village writes home to his sister about the bizarre way of life he encounters during a stay in America. (An updated “Gulliver’s Travels”)
A midweek roundup of peak oil news, including:
-Prices and production
-Deepwater Horizon
Anna L. Peterson’s “Everyday Ethics and Social Change: The Education of Desire (EE) concedes that is it is our nature to hope, even “when nothing in our world indicates progress is possible” (Pg. 1). She’s not a Pollyanna, noting there are no “valid arguments to justify moral and political hope… This book is about the connection between ‘that which is hoped for’ in our everyday lives and the possibility of [bringing about] this good on a larger and more lasting scale”.
It is said that profound policy decisions are determining how economic life in the United States will go over the next few years.
One view is that energy prices will rise, substitutes will be found, and prices will come back down again, perhaps settling at a somewhat higher equilibrium reflecting the cost of producing the substitute energy source… Another view, popular among those concerned about peak-oil, is that oil and energy prices will just keep rising. If scalable substitutes aren’t found, some expect that oil prices will rise from their current price of $75 barrel, to $100 barrel, to $200 barrel, to $300 barrel, and eventually to $1,000 barrel or more.
Like recycling, listening to NPR, and caring about the World Cup, everyday cooking has become a de rigeur activity for those with certain class and cultural aspirations. And that’s as it should be. We need more home cooks. If diversified, human-scale, community-directed farms are going to thrive, then a much broader swath of the population has to know how to turn raw ingredients into dinner — and do it regularly.
zero carbon britain 2030 is a fully integrated vision of how Britain can respond to the challenges of climate change, resource depletion and global inequity. It examines how we can meet our electricity and heating requirements through efficient service provision, while still decreasing emissions.
Building on earlier work of the Global Scenario Group and the Stockholm Environment Institute – Boston, this paper presents four updated and contrasting global scenarios for the twenty-first Century created with the PoleStar modeling system. These scenarios feature brief narratives and integrated quantifications across numerous economic, social, resource, and environmental dimensions.
