Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
“Don’t waste your breath” needs to become a mantra in the peak oil and sustainability communities. The season for arguing with peak oil and climate change deniers has long since passed. Our time is too precious and the need to act too urgent. The time has come for talkin’ triage.
– “Disaster on the Horizon” – new book on the Gulf oil spill
– Thomas Friedman: Build ‘Em And They Will Come
– Pentagon going green, because it has to
– US to Probe China’s Green-Tech Trade Policies
– Report for New Zealand Parliament: Dwindling Oil Supplies threaten economies
– Excerpt from NZ report “The next oil shock?”
– U.S. Congressional Briefing: Can Oil Production Meet Rising Demand?
The hard news is that there is no “Plan B.” The future is likely to be more chaotic than you probably think. This was the primary conclusion that I came to after attending the most recent Association for the Study of Peak Oil & Gas (ASPO) in Washington, DC in October, 2010.
The US administration ended its moratorium on deepwater drilling this week seven weeks ahead of schedule. The lifting of the ban – put in place in the wake of the BP Macondo oil well explosion – was greeted with muted enthusiasm from the oil industry…
Summaries of talks by Art Berman, Rick Munroe, Tad Paczek, Ken Zweibel, Ralph Nader, Anthony Perl, Dr. Charles Schlumberger, Sharon Astyk and Brian Czech.
For peak oil devotees, When Oil Peaked is a special treat, an eminently welcome update from a heavyweight within the field. For those who are new to peak oil or who just want a general overview, however, it’s a little more of a mixed bag. The sections on logistic versus Gaussian curves and other technical matters get awfully involved and esoteric, and casual readers may lack the fortitude to wade all the way through them. But the less involved parts on solutions, recommendations for policymakers and steps that each of us can take will hold the rapt attention of serious and casual readers alike.
A mid-week roundup of peak oil news, including:
-Developments this week
-The deep-water drilling ban
The witch of Hebron, herself a prostitute, is a beautiful, charming, intelligent caricature, overly-idealized by Kunstler who argues that in a post-collapse world, the rights of women and minorities, so dramatically achieved in the twentieth century, will become virtually extinct in a “world made by hand”.
Oil is “the lifeblood of modern civilisation”. This paper provides an overview of the global oil market. In particular, it examines the outlook for oil supply and demand over the next five years, and the economic consequences.
We are failing at even the most basic risk management. The real-time convergence of peak oil, peak food, and severe instabilities in the global economy may terminally collapse the systems upon which we depend for our basic welfare. The principal risk management challenge is not about how we introduce the energy infrastructure and conservation measures to maintain those systems, but about how we deal with the consequences of their collapse.
– Basra in southern Iraq has been transformed – thanks to oil
– Iraq has the oil stores, but does it have the know-how?
– Behind the coup in Ecuador
– Ecuador’s economy under Correa: 21st century socialism or the New-Extractivism? (Alberto Acosta interview)
