Resource Depletion

Asia’s epic urban sagas

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South Asians are seeing more work on the ground and hearing more policy announcements about urban development than ever before. For many who live in and around towns and cities in Bangladesh, Pakistan and India (where South Asia’s biggest cities lie) this could be a good thing. The trouble is: national governments and planning authorities in Dhaka, Islamabad and New Delhi are tending more and more to follow a single ideology – economic growth will drive down poverty – and a primary route to that misplaced objective, which is greater urbanisation.

Review: The Biochar Debate by James Bruges

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It’s called biochar, and if you believe its most ardent supporters, then this unassuming, fine black powder is a vital tool in the solutions to some of humanity’s most urgent ecological threats, including climate change, peak oil, soil degradation and water pollution due to agrochemicals. However, if you side with biochar’s staunch opponents, then it seems like a fledgling, poorly understood technology with real risks, including the displacement of entire communities and the serious jeopardizing of world food security and biodiversity. Which view is correct?

Totnes Energy Descent Action Plan website launched today!!

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It gives me the greatest pleasure this morning to launch the Totnes Energy Descent Action Plan website. The site makes the full version of the UK’s first EDAP freely available, invites comments and discussion, and will act as a dynamic portal for people to discuss the Plan and reshape subsequent revisions.

Industry leaders seem to be showing more openness to energy descent issues

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I’ve spent the last two days at the Institute for the Future’s Ten-Year Forecast retreat in Sausalito, CA…At this retreat, I introduced ideas relating to peak net energy, and the possibility of major changes in the years ahead. I found industry leaders much more open than I had expected to listening to and understanding our energy predicament, and talking about what may be ahead. In this post, I would like to tell you about my experience.

The consumption conundrum: driving the destruction abroad

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Our high-tech products increasingly make use of rare metals, and mining those resources can have devastating environmental consequences. But if we block projects like the proposed Pebble Mine in Alaska, are we simply forcing mining activity to other parts of the world where protections may be far weaker?

Out of our Ego Houses, into the Collective Intelligence

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Communal life – our tribal past – valued the group over the individual. We left our communal past to put the individual’s benefit (and especially material benefit) before the common good, in the process losing much of our memory of community.

Deepshit Horizon: Earth Day began with a blow-out, will it end with one?

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On January 28th, 1969 the Union Oil Company’s Platform A, located six miles from Santa Barbara, CA experienced a “blow-out.” Highly pressurized deposits of natural gas pushed upward against the newly bored well causing oil to leak from the pipe and casings…The blow-out was devastating. Ironically, and tragically, this year’s Earth Day celebrations coincided with another oil rig blow-out, this time offshore of Louisiana. Like other recent mining disasters, the explosion and sinking of the rig caused by a well blow-out has claimed the lives of at least eleven workers.

Peak phosphorus goes viral

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Phosphorus is one of the three elements critical for modern agriculture, and hence the survival of human beings.

In 2007, Energy Bulletin published the first report in which Hubbert analysis was applied to mined phosphorus supplies, highlighting the oncoming shortage. In recent months, articles on the subject have been published by Scientific American, Spiegel, Foreign Policy and Miller-McCune. Several institutes are beginning to look at the problem.

(Excerpts from these articles, plus prescient comments by Aldous Huxley, author of “Brave New World.”)

Tipping point: near-term systemic implications of a peak in global oil production

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We currently live within an integrated complex globalised economy. We have framed the process in which this occurs as a catastrophic bifurcation, driven by a series of reinforcing positive feedbacks. The final point will be a de-globalised (localised) economy of much reduced complexity.