Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Rising food prices leading to riots, protests, and revolts, mounting oil prices, mammoth worldwide unemployment, and a collapsed recovery — it looks like the perfect set of preconditions for a global tsunami of instability and turmoil. Events in Algeria and Tunisia give us just an inkling of what this maelstrom might look like, but where and how it will next erupt, and in what form, is anyone’s guess.
In the third video in the series “Peak Oil and a Changing Climate” from The Nation and On The Earth productions, co-editor of The Automatic Earth, Nicole M. Foss, explains how energy relates to the economy and what our impending energy crisis will look like. Foss discusses the issues associated with peak oil in financial rather than environmental terms, because she finds that peak oil has much more to do with finance than it does with climate change.
Blackout offers scholars and activists an overview of projections on future coal production and their complexities, but social movements will need to look elsewhere for what is to be done about the historical burden of our coal question.
[Excerpts]
The sheer scale of our dependency on nonrenewable, energy-dense "fossilized sunshine" is often lost on those who believe that renewable energy sources can supplant hydrocarbons at anything like today’s level of energy consuption. Thus it is prudent to examine the prognosis for fossil fuels within North America, as they will make up the bulk of our energy consuption for many decades to come…
For public health professionals, peak oil is significant because it will affect what are commonly called the social, environmental and economic determinants of health. For example, it will significantly affect, and require some reorganization of, our economic, transportation, and food systems. It is also important to public health professionals because it will very likely affect how health services are organized (the use of products and services dependent on petroleum permeates our health care system).
It’s not surprising then that food and energy experts are beginning to warn that 2011 could be the year of living dangerously — and so could 2012, 2013, and on into the future. Add to the soaring cost of the grains that keep so many impoverished people alive a comparable rise in oil prices — again nearing levels not seen since the peak months of 2008 — and you can already hear the first rumblings about the tenuous economic recovery being in danger of imminent collapse. Think of those rising energy prices as adding further fuel to global discontent.
-IEA doubles global gas reserves estimates
-Shareholders challenge gas companies on fracking
-Gasland: the review
-UK government rejects calls for shale gas moratorium
A weekly roundup of peak oil news, including:
-Oil and the global economy
-Iran’s nuclear program
-China
-Unrest in the Arab World
-Quote of the week
-Briefs
During a presentation last week a questioner asked me what I thought about predictions that gasoline prices would reach $5 a gallon this summer. I offered this critique. I said that the oil prices implied by $5-a-gallon gas could probably not be attained in such a weak global economy. And, something short of that price would probably send the economy into a tailspin.
BP increased its exposure to the ‘wild east’ this week through a new joint venture with the state-owned Russian oil giant Rosneft. Given the rocky history of its existing joint venture, TNK-BP, the deal illustrates the risks BP has been forced to take to gain access to meaningful oil resources…
Facing up to imminent peak oil and runaway climate change, the UK could start rationing fuel within ten years. Rationing sounds scary. But it’s much fairer than the alternative, which is to let high prices determine who drives and who doesn’t. And the Brits’ innovative plan for Tradable Energy Quotas would reward energy conservation while softening the blow of higher costs. Meanwhile, the US continues to be in denial about both climate and energy depletion. Is there any way this British plan could come to Washington?
The latest round of price spikes in food crops and petroleum sparked a corresponding round of predictions insisting that collapse can be expected shortly. Behind these claims is a foreshortening of historical perception that makes short term variations seem more important than the broader and slower patterns that drive them. Still, there’s one detail these claims get right; it’s now possible, with a fair degree of certainty, to put a specific date to the beginning of America’s catabolic collapse; the Archdruid explains.
