Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
As we look to transition away from fossil fuels, solar and wind are attractive options. Key factors making them compelling are: the inexhaustibility of the source with use (i.e., renewable); their low carbon footprint; and the independence that small-scale distribution can foster (I’ll never put a nuclear plant on my roof, even if it would make me the coolest physicist ever!).
Vigilante, klan, family and private justice, all are the path to barbarism today just as surely as they were when Aeschylus wrote the Oresteia. I will stand on the side of civilization for as long as I am able. The only alternative I see is what philosopher Thomas Hobbes called “a war of all against all.”
An eleventh hour political deal on the US debt crisis this week turned out to be just a stepping stone in the ongoing economic and fiscal crisis. By Thursday markets were plunging again on fears that Italy or Spain may default, and on the growing anticipation that the US may be returning to recession after Q1 GDP growth numbers were revised down from 1.9% to 0.4%.
Nothing sets me off more than people who portray Transition town folk as a bunch of happy clappy, ‘we just vision it and it will happen’ eco activists. Last night’s EGM of TRESOC (Totnes Renewable Energy Society) was a delightful, difficult, heart warming, and frustrating exploration of unknown territory; raw Transition in Action. It was a good example of what happens when a project moves from the great idea phase into real decision involving, in this case, significant sums of money, within a community…Although last night I think we emerged intact, more or less. It is what happens when a community expresses its will grounded in a positive vision- amazing things can happen.
A weekly roundup of peak oil news, including:
-Oil and the global economy
-Canada
-Japan
-Sabotaging pipelines
-Quote of the week
-Briefs
In this year, 2011, we are enjoying a lifestyle beyond the most optimistic dreams of past generations. We are benefitting from the whirlwind of achievements in science and technology during the last hundred years. There has never been a century like the one just passed, and there will never be another like it. Lifestyles will be very different when oil and gas are depleted.
Some time ago an economist with whom I had an extensive exchange suggested that the best way to incentivize an energy transition would be to tax what we don’t want and let the market do the rest. It was really such an elegant approach and an impractical one, I thought.
Most of the talk about renewable energy is aimed at electricity production. However, most of the energy we need is heat, which solar panels and wind turbines cannot produce efficiently. To power industrial processes like the making of chemicals, the smelting of metals or the production of microchips, we need a renewable source of thermal energy. Direct use of solar energy can be the solution, and it creates the possibility to produce renewable energy plants using only renewable energy plants, paving the way for a truly sustainable industrial civilization.
Between April last year and March this year, the world was struck by three Black Swan events that ‘everyone’ knew would happen, yet, strangely, seemed unprepared for when they did. The Gulf of Mexico oil leak, the political upheavals in the Middle East and North Africa (Mena) region and the earthquake-tsunami-nuclear tragedy in Japan are already inflicting history-altering impacts, not the least, because they have significantly and immediately reduced the world’s supply of cheap energy.
-Biofuel demand in US driving higher food prices, says report
-EU powers ahead with ‘sustainable’ biofuel certification schemes
-Lufthansa begins flights with biofuels
-US Air Force: We want to use biofuels
The world could soon be short of oil again, despite the worsening fiscal crisis, says the IEA. Although the turmoil in Europe threatened to engulf Italy – with the world’s third largest bond market – and the US budget standoff threatened its AAA credit rating, the Agency raised its 2012 oil demand growth forecast by 270,000 barrels/day.
Resource scarcity and climate change should be driving forward our transition to the energy systems of the future. Though this transition has started in important ways in several locations, change is not being undertaken at either the scale or speed required.
