Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Remember those long holiday road trips where the question endlessly repeated was “are we there yet”? Well, for many in the peak oil community, waiting for it to arrive has evoked a similar feeling, as the predictions of some academics, commentators, and bloggers have failed to materialize punctually.
In 2011, while working toward a Ph.D. in American Studies at the University of Minnesota, Matthew Schneider-Mayerson began a study into the peak oil community. His book Peak Oil: Apocalyptic Environmentalism and Libertarian Political Culture is the result of this research.
Entropy is an important concept, but it must be correctly understood to be useful. It is no good to use it as an excuse to pander unbridled catastrophism.
Hilary Jennings of Transition Town Tooting and Transition Network recently saw Ella Hickson’s explosive play Oil and was fascinated by it. It follows the lives of one woman and her daughter in an epic, hurtling collision of empire, history and family, and drills deep into the world’s relationship with this finite resource.
Reserves of conventional “easy” oil have mostly been used up. How likely is it that remaining reserves will be produced at the rate projected?
The frequency of Internet searches for the term “peak oil” has waned dramatically in recent years; now even the number of articles announcing the “death” of peak oil has dwindled, so universal is the assumption that the concept is completely debunked. Why bother beating a dead horse? With supreme irony, it could be within the next few years when the maximum-ever rate of world oil production is actually achieved, to be followed by terminal decline.
In the first part of this review, we looked at the climate and energy disruptions that have already begun in the Middle East, as well as the disruptions which we can expect in the next 20 years under a “business as usual” scenario. In this installment we’ll take a closer look at “the perpetual transmission of false and inaccurate knowledge on the origins and dynamics of global crises”.
On 16 November 2016 the International Energy Agency (IEA) presented its annual ”World Energy Outlook” report (WEO-2016).
So, the USGS comes out with a press release that the media immediately diffuse in terms of a great discovery: 20 billion barrels, somewhere in Texas in a place called "Wolfcamp".
Economists make forecasts about what is going to happen in the world of that great God – money.
Where are Philip Marlowe and Sam Spade when we need them? A crime is in progress, and only a detective who’s unafraid of stepping on powerful people’s toes is likely to get to the bottom of it.
There is no single extremely viable change we could make in our lives to combat fossil fuel consumption (and thus climate change) than ditching film and television.
