Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
As the Deepwater Horizon rig disaster continues to unfold, the peak oil community has a “teachable moment” in which it can illuminate the reality of our energy plight. The public has had a crash course in the challenges of offshore oil, and learned a whole new vocabulary. They are more aware than ever that the days of cheap and easy oil are gone.
As much as I intended to cover the pending designation of GNP National Monument in Montana, that will have to wait until next time. This week, there’s just no way a Daly News contributor could fail to focus on British Petroleum and the Deepwater spill.
What makes a mild-mannered biology professor call for a planned collapse of the economy? Canadian scientist Bill Rees would know. He was an inventor of the ecological footprint concept, and has been measuring our impact on the planet for decades. Now he’s worried about survival. Ours and all living systems.
It is embarrassing to be lost. It is even more embarrassing for a leader to be lost. And what’s really really embarrassing to all concerned is when national and transnational corporate leaders attempt to tackle a major disaster and are found out to have been issuing marching orders based on the wrong map. Everyone then executes a routine of turning toward each other in shock, frowning while shaking their heads slowly from side to side and looking away in disgust.
Flying dwarfs any other individual activity in terms of carbon emissions, yet more and more people are traveling by air. With no quick technological fix on the horizon, what alternatives — from high-speed trains to advanced videoconferencing — can cut back the amount we fly?
The British economy is officially, technically growing. Growth figures in the region of 0.2% confirm that it is out of recession. But what does this even mean? After months and months, in which funny money was flowing off the printing presses of its central bank and its formerly neo-liberal state came to represent more than 50% of GDP, we can be forgiven for viewing such statistics as a hall of mirrors.
The oil leak on Mississippi Canyon seafloor of the Gulf of Mexico proceeds apace. It is not clear that recent actions have succeeded in plugging the leak. The widely dispersed petroleum is a great disaster, but I get the distinct impression that this oil is seen as despoiling a pristine environment. Nothing could be further from the truth. I get this impression because, to my knowledge, the sorry state of the Gulf of Mexico before the oil spill has not been discussed.
So the Queen’s Speech has set out the policy priorities for the new government, but were the policies announced a cop-out or do they set out a wartime mobilisation scale of response to climate change and peak oil? These reflections are based on the article about the speech that appeared in yesterday’s Guardian.
Some days earlier we were debriefing from a speaking engagement at Tartu University, sitting in an open air café, when one of the students took up the argument about human nature and cultural inertia and said it would never be possible to get people to change their habits quickly enough to avert catastrophic climate change and die-off. We remarked that as long as there was a scintilla of hope, we could do no less than to keep trying to shift the paradigm.
A midweekly roundup of peak oil news, including:
-Prices and production
-Deepwater Horizon
Hail. Gale-force winds. Torrential rains. Blistering sun. Droughts. Late freezes. Flooding. Squash bugs, deer, squirrels, raccoons, tomato hornworms, spider mites. In any year, gardening can be a sheer exercise in will. With increasingly unpredictable weather, and zones that are already shifting North, it becomes almost an exercise in prayer.
-President Obama: Fed Gov’t in Charge of Efforts to Contain Oil Spill, Not BP
-BP and the Annals of the Tin Ear
-‘Top kill’ method ‘slows BP oil leak’ in Gulf of Mexico
-Setback Delays ‘Top Kill’ Effort to Seal Leaking Oil Well in Gulf
