Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
A month into BP’s Gulf of Mexico oil catastrophe, the US press began to say that the crisis might be ‘Obama’s 9/11’. It was a comparison that Obama himself repeated a couple of weeks later. Hyperbole? Perhaps – but the disaster certainly opens up space for thinking about alternatives to the industry that created it.
For Gulf residents, the BP oil spill has made the problem of unchecked corporate power painfully clear. Exxon Valdez survivor Riki Ott on why this may be the moment to overcome our political divides and take back our democracy.
I have been visiting A2R Farms outside of Corvallis Oregon all year. They are a former conventional grass seed farm transitioning to organic seed crops, primarily for local distribution. I watched as they planted the fields and as the crops grew–flax, chick peas, sunflowers and wheat. And as harvest season approached I looked over at the combines and asked my friend Clinton Lindsey, “Which one am I driving?”
“It frustrates me that journalists and even some professionals who should know better are driven by gross reserves numbers when a large part of those reserves won‘t be produced for decades – if they’re produced at all – and have no impact on the financial well-being of a country or company. They really are irrelevant to what will be happening over the next 20 years. Experts in the oil and oil service industries understand this, but I‘m not sure governments who set policy related to energy security and sustainability do”
Major energy reports published this year are pointing to a significant rise in the price of oil due to supply constraints sometime over the next three years – the only disagreement is how soon.
So far 2010 has seen three international reports considering the future of oil production, demand and prices. These were published by high profile groups that command widespread respect – in turn, a collection of UK industrialists, the US military and a joint effort between Europe’s most recognized insurance company and a politically connected think-tank.
Largely ignored by the media, and considered separately online as they came out, it is interesting to do a compare-and-contrast between documents produced for widely different audiences on each side of the Atlantic.
We are living through “interesting times”; credit crises, recession and rising debt threaten to destabilise nation states. Whilst reckless bankers and traders might have a certain amount of responsibility, if we are to understand the larger processes that are driving these trends we need to stand back and look at the human system as a whole. Change is inevitable – it’s one of the implications of the Laws of Thermodynamics. What we need to understand is the way human ecology works within these natural physical processes, how the contradictions between human systems and these natural processes define what is “unsustainable”, and what this means for our future as we adjust to the natural limitations of our environment.
– Peak oil alarm revealed by secret official talks
– What if there’s much less coal than we think?
– Peak Everything – a libertarian view
– Go solar before it’s too late!
– Think OPEC exports won’t decline? You’re living in a dreamworld
Every society attempts to determine which risks will be borne by the individual and which will be borne by the community. My task is to convince you that the idea of individual risk is flawed, and that to the extent we organize our society around it we are being hoodwinked by a false libertarian ideology, one that tells us there are choices available to the individual the consequences of which will fall only to that individual.
OPEC followed the IEA this week by revising its monthly oil demand forecast for 2010 and 2011 upwards. OPEC now forecasts an increase of 140,000 barrels to reach 86.56 million barrels per day (bpd) in 2011. This figure is still 1 million bpd shy of the IEA forecast and assumes stable US demand. Growth is anticipated to come from the emerging economies, which was underlined by news this week that China has now overtaken Japan as the second largest economy…
-Five steps to developing a community-based energy project
-Dream kitchen of the future is green, survey finds
-Reusing bike parts to power water pumps, corn crushers and more
-How Will Small Businesses Survive Peak Oil?
-Is the U.S. turning a corner on high-speed rail?
-Transport study call to slash carbon emissions
-The Big Lie: Highway Projects Help the US Economy
-Will the Aviation Industry and Climate Change Come in for a Smooth Landing?
London’s Do-It-Yourself Approach to Safer Streets
Transport Revolutions presents an ambitious vision of a world, 15 years from now, that is well on its way to kicking oil and being run on renewably produced electricity. The book’s authors, internationally recognized transport policy experts Richard Gilbert and Anthony Perl, readily acknowledge the enormity of this challenge, with transport worldwide currently 95 percent dependent on oil.
