Oil

Peak oil and a changing climate

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The scientific community has long agreed that our dependence on fossil fuels inflicts massive damage on the environment and our health, while warming the globe in the process. But beyond the damage these fuels cause to us now, what will happen when the world’s supply of oil runs out? In a new video series from The Nation and On The Earth Productions, Bill McKibben, Noam Chomsky, Nicole Foss, Richard Heinberg and other scientists, researchers and writers explain.

They’ll serve cocktails at the oil crash

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Douglas Coupland’s vision of an oil-crisis apocalypse in his novel “Player One” is so frightening because it seems so plausible. Would you like to be holed up in a tacky cocktail lounge of an airport hotel when oil hits $250 a barrel, the planes stop flying and the power goes out? And that’s just the beginning.

2011 predictions: a savage place

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2011 lays the ground for potential conflicts and battles that will be played out unless we get much wiser much faster. The emerging attention to our collective crisis will give some of the movement a jolt of new energy, time and investment in 2011. This will be the positive consequence of all the tough stuff we’re facing.

Living better in ‘the finite world’

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Economist Paul Krugman almost addressed the Limits to Growth in his recent article “The Finite World”, but pulled back before reaching the brink of suggesting there may be physical limits to economic growth. A Nobel Prize may await whomever finds a workable model to prosper human welfare under conditions of depleting resources. Will economists solve this problem, or ordinary people who are learning to live better in The Finite World?

The peak oil crisis: 2011 – a pivotal year?

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With the final surge in the world’s production of fossil fuels coming to an end the outlook for the global economy changes dramatically. … If much of the 5 or 6 million b/d of productive capacity that OPEC claims to have in reserve does not really exist or cannot be opened in a timely manner, then much higher oil prices seem likely by spring. This, of course, will reduce demand again and we are off on another cycle of falling demand, more economic damage, and eventually lower prices.