Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
The disconnect between the American body politic and reality grows larger every day. In reviewing hundreds of pages of commentary on the election, one searches in vain for analysis that even come close to describing what is happening to the nation – i.e. we are in the midst of a massive deflating credit bubble and running short of affordable liquid fuels at the same time.
This special show highlights contributors to the Post Carbon Reader: Managing the 21st Century’s Sustainability Crises. John Kaufmann was lead staff for Portland, Oregon’s Peak Oil Task Force, and he has consulted with local governments around the continent on how to prepare for energy scarcity. He describes how local governments are planning for scarcity, and what they’re missing (hint: a lot). Michael Shuman is Director for Research and Economic Development at BALLE, the Business Alliance for Local, Living Economies. He describes the surprising cost competitiveness of local businesses, despite government policies designed to destroy them.
So, last night CBS hauled Aubrey McClendon, CEO of Chesapeake Energy, on board their flagship Sunday infotainment vehicle, 60 Minutes… McClendon told the credulous Leslie Stahl and the huge viewing audience that America “has two Saudi Arabia’s of gas.” Now, you know immediately that at least half the viewers misconstrued this statement to mean that we have two Saudi Arabia’s of gasoline.
There are simply too many people out there who will never sit through a talk or read a book of non-fiction about our energy situation, but who would read a novel that lays the issues out clearly in the language of fiction. Cobb took on this project, not to write a best-selling novel, but to write the kind of book you can give to your sister-in-law who won’t read the other books you want to give her!
With the election frenzy behind us, and the Fed printing money like there’s no tomorrow, it seems like a good time to return to the shale gas “boom” in the Marcellus.
Coal is very vital to China and decreasing exports, together with increasing import clearly show that they have a supply problem. But whether this is due to resource problems, production problems or infrastructure bottlenecks is hard to say yet. A more comprehensive study of the Chinese coal assets needs to be done.
The world is going to get rounder and bigger again. We’ll discover — surprise! — that the global economy was a set of transient economic relations that obtained only because of a half century of cheap energy and relative peace between the big nations.
“I have seen a lot of people not quite getting what economically might happen. I have seen a lot of people assuming there is a kind of energy decline curve, so that economy might sort of to follow that. But we are entering this decline curve with the highest level of leverage, or debt, on record. We have been towering up huge amounts of debt that requires constant growth. So I see the possibility, again a risk, of a more disruptive future than perhaps others do.”
For those addicted to more roads, airports and the sweet smell of gasoline, the IEA’s 2010 World Energy Outlook includes some pretty sober reading.
My goal in writing Prelude was to help to create a self-reinforcing spiral of awareness, to break out beyond the peak oil community, beyond even the sustainability community, and to reach people who know little or nothing about such issues.
Anyone who has spent much time discussing peak oil, the collapse of civilizations, climate change or modern security issues eventually confronts the issue of historical antecedents. The [Insert choice of vanished civilization here] collapsed because of X, and that’s the same thing that is happening now . . . . For those who have delved more deeply into such lines of argument, one thing becomes abundantly clear: historical civilizations did not collapse for a single reason. Fast-forward to present, and there is no shortage of commentary forecasting crisis or collapse of our modern civilization. But these analysts have failed to advance a comprehensive systems-theory approach to our civilization’s troubles. Enter Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed.
A weekly roundup of peak oil news, including:
-Oil and the global economy
-World Energy Outlook 2010
-China
-Briefs
-Quote of the week
