Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
As Iraqi’s prepare to go to the polls on Sunday the country has been subjected to a month of increased violence including a string of blasts in Baghdad on Thursday targeting early voters which killed at least 14 people. The election, which will decide the next chapter of Iraq’s future, is being keenly watched by the oil industry…
What I have said may provoke anxiety, and is certainly an immense undertaking, but ultimately we have no choice so let’s not whine and delay. Let’s take it on as a great adventure, a thrilling challenge. Our success or failure is going to hinge on our attitude. We need to take control of the circumstances and become active participants in transition.
A weekly update including:
– Prices and production
– Iraqi elections
A lot of what I write works from the assumption that we all agree that peak oil and climate change are happening and going to be life-changing events. And yet, some people who read this blog don’t necessarily agree on this subject, or they don’t see the effects has being as profound as I do, or perhaps the idea of peak oil or climate change is fairly new to them, and they don’t know what to believe.
Farmers are invisible people, and middle-class city dwellers choose to pretend that the long lines of trucks bringing food into the city at dawn every day have nothing to do with the white-collar world. Perhaps it is a mark of the civilized person to believe that the essentials of food, clothing, and shelter have no relevance to daily life. Yet if the farmers stopped sending food into the great vacuum of the metropolis, the great maw of urbanity, the city would soon start to crumble, as Britain discovered in the year 2000 [5]. The next question, then, is: Where does all this food come from?
The United States apparently has reached the point where it must either accept that Iran will develop nuclear weapons at some point if it wishes, or take military action to prevent this. There is a third strategy, however: Washington can seek to redefine the Iranian question. As we have no idea what leaders on either side are thinking, exploring this represents an exercise in geopolitical theory. Let’s begin with the two apparent stark choices.
-Matt Simmons: Oil shortage spills into water
-Photographer Burtynsky recent focus on water rooted in political power, control
-Water and the War on Terror
With each passing day, it is becoming increasingly likely that the future of our gasoline prices and consequently our economic well-being over the next few years will be determined by what happens with China’s economy.
-What the Olympics Can Teach Us About the Price of Gas
-Pickens expects approval of key natural gas plan
-Asia buys record volume of W.African oil in Q1
-Russia February Output Nears Post-Soviet Record on TNK-BP
-RBS accused over funding for tar sands ‘blood oil’
A weekly roundup of peak oil news, including:
-Prices and production
-Looming electricity shortages
-China’s macro control
-Quote of the week
-Briefs
If we want to have any hope in controlling our destiny we have to understand our environment. In one sense, if we treat our environment as a control system, capable of responding to a stimulus, we need to understand not only its behavior, but how it will respond to the stimulus. One can ask: will it collapse in response to dwindling resources? Or will it rebound and stay resilient? For that we require a good model of the system. And of course, the simpler the model to describe, the better.
The oil supply challenge is often summarized in terms of the production volume equivalent of Saudi-Arabia’s that needs to be replaced. This popular metric is based on in-depth studies of global decline rates that show a decline range between 4.5 and 6 percent over the current 73 million barrels of crude oil produced per day.
