Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
– White House, GOP Battle for Supremacy on Tar Sands Pipeline
– Interview with peak oil journalist and novelist Kurt Cobb
– Hunt for Gas Hits Fragile Soil, and South Africans Fear Risks
– In conversation with peak oil pioneer Dr. Colin J Campbell (video)
– Steve LeVine’s Oil and the Glory: End-of-year edition
In this third and final article in this series, we will discuss seven new ways of living which we can adopt as economic growth fails. They are not revolutionary (revolutions never achieve their utopian visions because of something called “human nature”). Rather, they may allow us to “muddle through” the best we can right now with what we already know how to do. We will do these things because they will work — and we certainly need to stop doing things that don’t work, and find new ways that will work.
We cannot “set things right” in the sense of restoring things to the way they once were, but we must begin now to adapt to the new realities if we are to reduce suffering and continue an advanced culture. Today’s article, “Out With the Old”, discusses ending seven unsustainable practices.
– Protests seen as stand against fossil fuels
– U.S. Congress hands energy industry historic victory
– Oil lobby lagging reality
– The politics of pipe: Keystone’s troubled route
– If You Care About Keystone and Climate Change, Occupy Exxon
– Official White House Response to Reject the Keystone XL Pipeline
There are many uncertainties to how a European collapse might unfold, but Europe is at least twice as able to weather the next, predicted oil shock as the United States. Once petroleum demand in the US collapses following a hard crash, Europe will for a time, perhaps for as long as a decade, have the petroleum resources it needs, before resource depletion catches up with demand.
Europe is ahead of the United States in all the key Collapse Gap categories, such as housing, transportation, food, medicine, education and security. In all these areas, there is at least some system of public support and some elements of local resilience. How the subjective experience of collapse will compare to what happened in the Soviet Union is something we will all have to think about after the fact.
As The Big Engine That Couldn’t has faltered for several years, it is becoming increasingly clear the economy is running off the tracks. Both investors and the public are beginning to realize the long-revered goal of endless economic growth is failing. Anger and fear are widespread, as the livelihoods and hopes of ordinary Americans are being destroyed. Anger runs among the “99%” over economic injustices that favor the “1%”. Fear, however, may run among 100% over this question: How do we live when economic growth fails?
A look at tidal power, which is virtually inexhaustible on relevant timescales, is less intermittent than solar/wind (although still variable), and uses old-hat technology to make electricity. Is it “abundant,” “useful,” or “a waste of time”?
Why did the Deepwater Horizon blow up last year, kill 11 workers, and cause the massive oil eruption into the Gulf of Mexico? You’re likely to get different answers if you talk separately to a petroleum engineer or an anthropologist. When they team up, it gets really interesting. Anthropologist Joseph Tainter (author of The Collapse of Complex Societies) and petroleum engineer Tad Patzek talk about the new book they’ve co-authored: Drilling Down: The Gulf oil debacle and our energy dilemma.
OPEC head Abdullah El-Badri warned European leaders on Wednesday against imposing sanctions on Iranian oil, stating that the 865,000 barrels a day which goes mostly to Southern Europe would be difficult to replace. Global supply is already tight and oil prices remain stubbornly high despite the chronic Euro-crisis…
Having written extensively on occultism and the esoteric, and himself an adept in ritual magic, John Michael Greer is an eager student of the unexplained. Yet he’s also a sharp observer of the unexamined assumptions that people make about the physical world around them, and how these assumptions have helped land the world in its present crisis. One common presupposition is that nature is independent of the world of human economics, and thus can be treated as a disposable resource. An environmentalist and a devout follower of the druid path, Greer knows better, and he’s written several books seeking to dispel this mistaken dismissal of nature.
– Five Truths About Our Energy Future (from the IEA’s Fatih Birol)
– Is Oil Fueling the Rise in Political Partisanship? (analysis)
– Peak oil debate losing relevance due to new upstream technology: Repsol CEO
– David Strahan: Has the world reached economic peak oil?
Mortimer Zuckerman, the chairman and editor in chief of U.S. News & World Report, announced on November 25, 2011 that America’s energy problems are over thanks to the shale gas revolution. Unfortunately, this is not really true.
