Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
– WikiLeaks: A battle to ‘carve up’ the Arctic
– China Admits Problems With Three Gorges Dam
– Ugo Bardi: The return of cold fusion?
– Jeremy Leggett interview (now an editor)
– Jan Lundberg interviewed in Shanghai Oriental Morning Post
The story of the presidential campaign of former U.S. Representative John B. Anderson is so at odds with anything we see going on in politics today that it almost seems like it happened in a whole other country if not to say on a completely different planet.
Worried about high oil prices and exploding nuclear plants? Carry on shoppers, because we’ve found gold right under our feet – a bonanza of natural gas. Yes, fracking will fill your tank, heat your house, and light up the streets for another 100 years. At least that’s what we’ve been told. A new report out from the Post Carbon Institute pokes a sharp pin in the natural gas bubble. We’ll hear from energy analyst David Hughes.
Julian Cribb, Principal of Julian Cribb and Associates presentation on what are the future challenges to our food system at the National Sustainable Food Summit in Melbourne Australia on 5-6 April, 2011.
There appeared to be signs of growing panic behind the latest declaration from the International Energy Agency. The statement calls on oil producing countries to increase production and reduce costs in order to avert economic crisis. To date Opec members have been insisting that the market is well supplied and that prices are being driven by speculation…
A midweek roundup of peak oil news, including:
-Developments this week
Although it is peak oil and climate change that initially inspire Transition initiatives and form the underpinning for much of the initial awareness stage, might it be that an initiative reaches a point where continued focus on those issues could be counterproductive?
Despite the recent drop in oil prices, the outlook for the remainder of the year is not good. If the IEA numbers are correct the world is probably burning more oil each day than is coming out of the ground, with the difference being made up from the 2.6 billion barrel stockpiles held by the OECD countries. Every day brings new stories of coal, electric power and oil product shortages in some corner of the world. The climate too is not cooperating with significant crop failures imminent.
User’s Guide to the Crisis of Civilization shows how our major crises share the same root causes and thus can be solved only by taking into account their complex interactions. Ahmed acknowledges that in this age of specialization it’s understandable for issues like climate change and oil depletion to be studied and discussed separately—indeed, he observes that this mode of inquiry into the causes of specific phenomena has enabled many of our greatest scientific advances. But it’s also, he argues, beginning to seem like an increasingly antiquated method, preventing experts from seeing the whole picture and the public from receiving consistent information.
It has often been said that we would only be able to see peak oil by looking in the rear view mirror. It’s well past time for a head-check, so this post provides a quick look back at production over the last five years and at some of the predictions I and others have made.
Is the central assertion of this book – that world economic growth is over – already disproved? How else to explain China’s continued exuberant expansion, or signs of recovery in the U.S. in 2010?
The implications of the Hughes report are disturbing. Without dramatic reductions in consumption of fossil fuels from outright conservation to energy efficiency (he strongly recommends more co-generation and targeting fuels to their highest-value applications), the rapid exploitation of shale gas will only confirm Eric Sevareid’s law: “the chief cause of problems are solutions.”
