Interview with Dr. Colin Campbell

Zone5 Podcast #3 with Dr. Colin Campbell on Peak Oil, the Financial Collapse, Adaptation and What the Future May Hold. Colin Campbell, founder of the Association for the Study of peak Oil and Gas, is officially retired from his career as oil geologist and Peak Oil pundit but kindly agreed to this interview for the zone5 podcast.

What is collapse, anyway?

With any reasonably successful blog, you have a conversation going on, often between an author and commenters who have a long history and background, and people coming into the conversation for the first time…Balancing the degree to which you write for the regulars and to those new to you is always an interesting exercise.

Euroland, the horror movie

An Olympian game of musical chairs in global finance heads for a climax in the days ahead as so many eyes are diverted to alternate festivities in British Columbia, where grown men compete for gold by riding things that look like cafeteria trays down icy mountainsides — is this the moment that comes every four years when you wonder why you didn’t get your kid a luge for Christmas?

The Transition Towns Movement: Its Huge Significance and a Friendly Criticism

The world is immensely complicated, and the forces of sweeping change may overall boost transition towns for their positive contribution. Or as Ted Trainer lays out below, a course correction is needed now.

Obama: The Making of a Clean Coal President

President Obama has issued marching orders for the rapid national adoption of “clean coal” technology. Last week, shortly after his budget address, he ordered a high-level task force to deliver a plan within 180 days determining how “to overcome barriers to the widespread, cost-effective deployment of CCS within 10 years, with the goal of bringing 5 to 10 commercial demonstration projects on line by 2016.”

Energy Transitions and the Next “Paradigmatic Image of the World”

The history of modern humankind has undergone two major energy transitions, marked by the invention and development of agriculture and the discovery and exploitation of oil. The two energy transitions partition human history into three phases: hunter-gatherer, agricultural, and industrial. Faber et al. (1996) refer to these phases as “Paradigmatic Images of the World,” because they describe the common structure of societies throughout the world. The most important question is “what is the next paradigmatic image of the world?”