Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
“Financial crisis is going to make resource depletion much harder to address, because we are not going to have the money to replace highly energy-dependent infrastructure. Doing so would be staggeringly expensive and would take a very long time even if we did have the money. As it is, we will be forced to conserve both money and resources by going without.”
Suburbia is a favorite whipping boy, especially when the topic of peak oil or energy descent comes up. It was a bad idea, a short-sighted endeavor made even more tragic by our then less complete understanding of energy and environmental constraints. Everyone take ten seconds and think about how terrible suburbia is.
Great. Now drop it. Suburbia happened. Is there value in articulating exactly why it was a bad idea? Yes, especially to the extent that we should stop building more of it in its current form. But that’s not the conversation I’m interested in having. The question we should focus on is what to do about it. And the answers, perhaps not surprisingly, can be easily divided into three categories: do nothing and pray; abandon it for something better, transform it.
– Monbiot: The Tea Party movement: deluded and inspired by billionaires
– NYT: Coal Industry Spending to Sway Next Congress
– New book confirms greed, power and cover-up are BP trademarks
“Large conventional oil production is increasingly no longer part of the future. We must expect to get along without what has been our critical energy source in expanding the world’s economy for more than half a century. But acceptance [of the idea of peak oil] by knowledgeable people is not enough.
“Our willingness, let alone our ability, to do anything serious about the impending inability to increase oil output is still a long way off. The political order responds to what the public believes today, not to what it may come to believe tomorrow.”
Dr. Schlesinger has served as Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission (1971-73), Secretary of Defense (1973-75), Director of the CIA and was the first Secretary of Energy (1977-79).
Keynote address to the recent ASPO-USA conference in Washington D.C. (transcript and video) .
Big oil was smiling this week as Q3 profits rose on the back of higher oil prices. Prices are 12% higher than last year, and according to JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs are likely to go higher, even above $100/barrel, by next year. Such a price rise may provide a test of OPEC’s ability to raise production…
We will see if a safe and prosperous Taiwan emerges or will it be melt down; The China Syndrome – (although if you are in China then perhaps it is the USA syndrome?)
A midweek roundup of peak oil news, including:
-Developments this week
-Alaska
In a perfect world, such a drastic shift in our economic and societal prospects [as is represented by peak oil] would be at the top of the political agenda. Elections would be fought over the best way to transition our economy and civilization to surviving with reduced and much more expensive energy
The prospect of abundant, cheap natural gas in the United States—especially gas that’s easily delivered by pipeline to the populous East Coast—profoundly shakes up that energy equation.
A Canadian study of shale gas fracking and its impact on water quality was released earlier this month. Entitled Fracture Lines: Will Canada’s Water be Protected in the Rush to Develop Shale Gas?, the study was conducted by Ben Parfitt…He argues that when the low net energy/EROEI from shale gas is coupled with environmental concerns such as carbon emissions and water problems, shale gas looks less and less like the sure-fire“bridge to a cleaner energy future” claimed by its proponents.
Two worlds will collide in Cancun, but they share a single planet. If the world that defends our current model of production and consumption prevails, the planet will edge ever closer to catastrophe. The second world offers hope of a new path. Its solutions are multiple and small-scale, and require political will more than massive resources or new technologies. This second world seeks a new balance in our lives between our environment, our food systems, and our jobs.
This “how-to” manual is intended to help Americans effectively and efficiently address a wide variety of problems that now loom darkly on the horizon. The various chapters will help create a viable, resilient and sustainable oil-free transportation and economic system that can operate in parallel with our existing petroleum based system. These plans all rely on mature, proven and economically viable technologies and not the current “Hunt for Miracles” that Secretary of Energy Chu has so aptly described his department’s Advanced Projects Research.
An oil-free transportation system effectively addresses the single greatest strategic threat to the national security of the United States of America — the possibility and indeed probability that “one day” we will no longer be able to import and produce enough oil to keep our economy, our society and eventually our military functioning properly.
