Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Today I’m starting another Adapting-In-Place Class, beginning with the basics of evaluating whether you have a future where you are, what your other choices are, and then triaging your situation, but I’ve already written a good bit about those things, so I want to a basic and essential element of triage – establishing redundant systems.
Everyone agrees: our economy is sick. The inescapable symptoms include declines in consumer spending and consumer confidence, together with a contraction of international trade and available credit. Add a collapse in real estate values and carnage in the automotive and airline industries and the picture looks grim indeed.
– High-speed rail plan ‘will progressively replace short-haul flights’
– EU reaches gas deal with Ukraine
-Call for more intervention on energy
The findings in last weeks’ FSA report that there is little to choose between organic and “conventional” food in terms of the major nutrients is hardly a surprise. For many including myself, less rigidly defined labels such as “local” and “chemical-free” have been more important especially if we can see for ourselves how the food is grown.
Richard Heinberg’s new book Blackout tries to demolish current assumptions about the world’s remaining coal endowment: namely, that it is immense beyond belief, barely tapped and will last for centuries to come. Heinberg argues that these assumptions are off-base, misleading and not at all supported by recent studies that suggest global coal production could peak in less than two decades.
The Strategic Studies Institute (SSI) at the US Army War College has issued many stimulating research papers in recent years, several of which deal with energy security issues. Nathan Freier’s recent SSI paper (which we will examine here) does not focus on energy issues. Rather, the central purpose of his study is to present a paradigm for the examination of potential strategic shocks.
– Review: A Preliminary Investigation of Energy Return on Energy Investment for Global Oil and Gas Production
– Exclusive Warning: Oil supplies are running out fast
– Another crunch is coming – but will the world act?
A weekly review including:
– Production and prices
– Priorities
– Mexico
– Briefs
Last year the global credit crunch and its knock-on effects precipitated the sharpest oil and gas price declines in over two decades. Despite the recent $100+/ Bbl price implosion and subsequent partial recovery, we have now entered an historic inflection point—call it “practical peak oil”—in the global balance of conventional energy supplies…
Learn about the planning behind the 2009 conference of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas.
A weekly update from a UK perspective.
Canada’s increasing reliance on energy exports, especially oil from the Alberta tar sands, risks unsettling its politics and economy and turning the country into a petrostate–an authoritarian society in which dissent is stifled and enterprises beyond the energy sector are de-emphasized or even discouraged.
