Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
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…
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.
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?
-Canada’s Quebec province opens up north for mining
-Arctic nations eye region’s potential
-Oil prices, poor countries and policy responses
So what do you think? Do you think left and right, in some or all variations can work together? To what extent are political ends enough, and to what extent are the means and underlying enlightenment philosophies critical?
A weekly roundup of peak oil news, including:
-Oil and the global economy
-The Mississippi flood
-The IEA’s monthly report
-China’s problems
-In Washington
-Quote of the week
-Briefs
At the most basic level, climate changes that cause world surface temperatures to rise are rooted in increased fossil emissions in the atmosphere. Total fossil fuel emissions are a function of key variables, most notably population, per-capita gross domestic product (GDP) and the carbon intensity of an individual unit of GDP. Understanding these forces and their relationships with each other is critical to measuring the extent of climate change and how we may seek to deal with it.
