Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
“How to Boil a Frog” is that rare beast, a funny movie about peak oil, climate change, etc. Early versions have been circulating to the delight of those lucky enough to see it. It’s good news indeed that the movie will now be viewable by the public.
For a few days last week, global news agencies pursued the peculiar story of the world’s worst traffic jam, which was reported to have lasted for around nine days and stretched across about 100 kilometres of a major highway leading to Beijing. China’s latest instance of leading the world, now in the scale and size of traffic jams, is a direct consequence of the modern uses and abuses of energy.
I’m usually known as one of the doomers’n’gloomers on the blogs, with diaries and comments on the economy heavily leaning towards negative views. And to a large extent, I still stand by these positions and fully expect (i) the economy to dive again and (ii) an even worse financial crisis coming our way.
I’m also part of the peak oil / peak resources crowd, and do not consider our current civilisation, especially as hundreds of millions in emerging markets rush to embrace it, to be sustainable. … But, surprisingly, I also have a number of arguments to be optimistic for the medium term, i.e. that let me hope that I will not spend my late years in poverty and/or in the middle of societal collapse.
Cairn Energy announced this week that it had found evidence “indicative of an active hydrocarbon system” off Greenland. The news comes in the middle of a bidding round for oil and gas exploration licences there. The US Geological Survey estimated in 2008 that the region contains approximately 90 billion barrels of technically recoverable oil, but producing the stuff would combine the extreme challenges of deepwater drilling, extreme cold, and ice. Any accident would be massively harder to deal with than Deepwater Horizon because of the country’s remoteness…
A study based on the Hubbert model of peak oil suggests a coming global oil shock may begin as early as 2014 – which ties in with the timeline suggested in a variety of other reports and statements. Despite getting a showing online, and in the occasional business report, [peak oil is] yet to break into the mainstream media. I recently considered three major energy reports published so far in 2010 which take a number of different views on the issue.
A midweekly roundup of peak oil news, including:
-Prices and production
-Concern in Her Majesty’s Government?
-BP loses Arctic drilling race due to Gulf oil disaster
-Greenland happy to be the new oil frontier
-Danes block Greenpeace vessel in Arctic
A month into BP’s Gulf of Mexico oil catastrophe, the US press began to say that the crisis might be ‘Obama’s 9/11’. It was a comparison that Obama himself repeated a couple of weeks later. Hyperbole? Perhaps – but the disaster certainly opens up space for thinking about alternatives to the industry that created it.
Author Richard Heinberg’s nine books include The Party’s Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies and Peak Everything: Waking Up to the Century of Declines. He discusses what we know about peak oil, as well as its connection to the end of economic growth.
For Gulf residents, the BP oil spill has made the problem of unchecked corporate power painfully clear. Exxon Valdez survivor Riki Ott on why this may be the moment to overcome our political divides and take back our democracy.
I have been visiting A2R Farms outside of Corvallis Oregon all year. They are a former conventional grass seed farm transitioning to organic seed crops, primarily for local distribution. I watched as they planted the fields and as the crops grew–flax, chick peas, sunflowers and wheat. And as harvest season approached I looked over at the combines and asked my friend Clinton Lindsey, “Which one am I driving?”
Major energy reports published this year are pointing to a significant rise in the price of oil due to supply constraints sometime over the next three years – the only disagreement is how soon.
So far 2010 has seen three international reports considering the future of oil production, demand and prices. These were published by high profile groups that command widespread respect – in turn, a collection of UK industrialists, the US military and a joint effort between Europe’s most recognized insurance company and a politically connected think-tank.
Largely ignored by the media, and considered separately online as they came out, it is interesting to do a compare-and-contrast between documents produced for widely different audiences on each side of the Atlantic.
