Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
It has been 18 months since we all worried very much about high oil prices. Starting in July 2008 gasoline prices took an historic plunge dropping from a U.S. average high of $4.11 a gallon all the way down to $1.70 in January 2009.
Oil prices began the year with a rally, reaching nearly $84 a barrel as temperatures across much of the northern hemisphere required the heating to be turned up a notch.
As others have pointed out, many of Haiti’s problems have been related to its population density, associated environmental degradation and its need for cheap energy. Now, with the worst earthquake shaking the Caribbean in 200 years, we must sadly add another chapter to the Haitian book chronicling the linkage between its human and ecological disasters.
A midweek roundup of peak oil news, including:
-Prices and production
-China’s Economy
-Oil Demand Seems to be Moving Up – Are Higher Prices around the Corner?
-To Slow Growth, China Raises an Interest Rate
-Chinese Transportation Growth
-US raises concern over China oil policy
The economy is subordinate to nature and not vice versa.
The American West at Risk’s 13 chapters examine some of the major human-caused environmental problems now threatening the 11 contiguous Western states…Citing trustworthy, peer-reviewed studies in support of its arguments, and written by three trained scientists, this book has every claim for credibility—and is an enlightening and gripping read for scientists and laypeople alike.
On December 2, 2009, the Bloomington City Council overwhelmingly approved the report of the Bloomington Peak Oil Task Force entitled Redefining Prosperity: Energy Descent and Community Resilience (PDF 13.36 MB). The report is the product of a seven-member task force and outlines the community’s vulnerability to a decline in cheap oil and proposes numerous mitigation strategies.
-2020 vision: Second-hand Prius, anyone? Car use declines across Europe as society returns to medieval values
-America’s New Year’s resolution: Break our addiction to oil
-Retired, no, refired, yes: on call for collapse
-Portland ratchets up volunteer-led ‘tool libraries’ that lend tools for free
-Nine meals from anarchy
-Boiler scrappage scheme offers £400-off vouchers
Taped in late 2005 before Peak Moment began, this conversation feels eerily prescient about the effects of the 2008 financial collapse. William Stewart reflects on the shadow side of the fossil fuel bonanza, which enabled hyper-individualism and mobility that have shredded our connections to community and place, along with increased violence and dysfunction. Likening our oil-dependent culture to an addict who must first bottom out, he suggests there may be a silken lining after collapse: the possibility of more communal and connected ways of life.
-Here’s something about North Dakota worth imitating
-The Other Plot to Wreck America
-America slides deeper into depression as Wall Street revels
-Can Farming Save Detroit?
-The Visual Du Jour – What If…?
-Economists start to consider that money can’t buy happiness
-Peak oil demand funds
In his 1865 book “The Coal Question: An Inquiry Concerning the Progress of the Nation, and the Probable Exhaustion of our Coal-Mines,” English economist William Stanley Jevons made the observation “Of the Economy of Fuel” that when improvements in technology make it possible to use a fuel more efficiently, the consumption of the fuel tends to go up, not down.
