Fossil Fuels

Timing

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Forecasting global catastrophe can be a tricky business, because everyone wants to know just when it will happen. And there’s the rub. As a card-carrying member of the Cassandra Club, I’ve found this a perennial briarpatch. There have been so many variables at play that about all one could say with absolute confidence is that industrial civilization will run out of rope “sometime in the first two or three decades of the 21st century.”

Decisions, Decisions: “Blind Spot” or “The Great Sqeeze”?

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Always eager to preview Long Emergency, end-of-civilization-oriented documentaries, I recently found myself in a rather blessed quandary. I received review copies of “Blind Spot” from Director Adolfo Doring and Producer Amanda Zakem and “The Great Squeeze” by Director/Producer Christoph Fauchere and Co-Producer, Joyce Johnson, but as I watched both several times, I found it almost impossible to decide which one I preferred.

After the bird strike

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Against the backdrop of widespread economic carnage, the fact that global oil production likely peaked last summer seems almost irrelevant. The prevailing meme has long been that since oil created prosperity, peak oil would devastate it-but derivatives launched a pre-emptive strike.

Peak oil – March 29

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Matt Simmons sees oil shock from credit crunch
Kurt Cobb: Is thorium an energy alchemist’s dream?
Energy pundits duke it out at Aspen Institute
Social critic James Kunstler offers a decidedly darker view
CBC on peak oil, Transition Town Totnes and Robert Hirsch
Jeff Rubin: Oil scarcity will spell end of globalisation