Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
We tend to settle into routines. But once in a while extraordinary events disrupt normalcy. We may question assumptions and be open to new information and change. A grief process is common in these times too. The accident in the Gulf of Mexico is a disruptive event. Here’s an essay that puts it into personal perspective for me.
The oil slick spreading across the Gulf of Mexico has shattered the notion that offshore drilling had become safe. A close look at the accident shows that lax federal oversight, complacency by BP and the other companies involved, and the complexities of drilling a mile deep all combined to create the perfect environmental storm.
-Crews dealt setback in placing containment dome in Gulf oil spill
-Oil production hit for decades after BP spill
-How big is the Deepwater Horizon oil spill?
-Tread carefully, Mr Obama. You need big oil
A quick roundup of ongoing oil spill news.
The explosion and destruction of the Horizon deepwater rig and the subsequent oil spill disaster are only the latest in a series of wake-up calls you’ve received. Are you listening now? Your first warning came in 1956, with the publication of M. King Hubbert’s model of US oil production, which correctly predicted its peak in 1970. When Hubbert updated his model on camera in 1976, he also nailed the peak of worldwide conventional oil production in 2005.
The map of the area threatened by the BP blowout, comprising nearly half of the US’s coastal wetlands, looks like tattered lace. It’s a realm of islands, shoals, estuaries, marshes, swamps, bayous, and creeks, land speckled across water, water twining across land, all of it in flux…
Electric motors and batteries have improved substantially over the past one hundred years, but today’s much hyped electric cars have a range that is – at best – comparable to that of their predecessors at the beginning of the 20th century. Weight, comfort, speed and performance have eaten up any real progress. We don’t need better batteries, we need better cars.
The news was dominated this week by the race against time to stem the flow of oil from the Transocean Deepwater rig disaster, and the potentially devastating ecological impact of the spill. BP’s mitigation effort has been painfully slow to watch, and once again placed a spotlight on the high risk world of deepwater oil extraction.
The Gulf of Mexico “spill” is really a man-made underwater volcano of oil. This accident taps a primeval fear in the human mind. Something dark and uncontrollable rushes out of the Earth, poisoning the global oceans. Could that really happen? Richard Heinberg, Anita Burke, Riki Ott, Antonia Juhasz, and new song “Corporate Catastrophe”.
When a society’s problems are caused by too much complexity, adding more layers of complexity is a recipe for more problems. In the abstract, this is easy enough to grasp, but applying it in practice is quite another matter. Fortunately, the writings of maverick economist EF Schumacher come to the rescue with another of his counterintuitive but valuable insights.
The drawing of parallels between industrial accidents is a dubious armchair sport, but here the parallels are just piling up and are becoming too hard to ignore.
Peak oil theorists predict an impending terminal decline of world oil production, with no adequate alternate resource and technology available to replace oil as the backbone resource of industrial society. Instead of endlessly debating whether peak oil theorists are right or wrong, let us simply ask what would happen if they were right. Based on historical case studies I suggest that there would be different reactions in different parts of the world, ranging from predatory militarism to authoritarian retrenchment and the mobilization of local resilience.
