Peak Oil
sastyk | November 9, 2011Robert Rapier was one of the great pleasures of ASPO-USA's recent conference - his presentation was one of the best and as a long-time admirer of his work, it was a pleasure to finally meet him personally. I also like his current piece on the most common misconceptions about peak oil. Like him, I don't like the term peak oil at all - because I think it fixates us on precisely the wrong things - the downslope matters more than the peak. I particularly like this point:
Misconception 2: Peak Oil Beliefs are Homogeneous
The beliefs among people who are concerned about resource depletion cover…
sastyk | November 8, 2011Someone once observed that attending an ASPO-USA conference is like trying to drink from a firehose - there's just so much information, so many amazing people, so many sessions, so much to do that it can be overwhelming as well as stimulating, engaging and delightful.
Helping to RUN an ASPO-USA conference is a little like drinking from two Firehoses at once, only vastly more enjoyable. Still, the only time I remember getting that little sleep was with my newborns. The combination of absorbing all the amazing information and also acting as host to more than 300 guests, working with…
sastyk | October 27, 2011From The Onion:
Admitting they had "absolutely no idea what the fuck [they were] doing," millions of Americans immediately ceased trying to manage the country's large-scale, ongoing disasters and pleaded with U.S. scientists, economists, educators, philosophers, and inventors to intervene and make things better again.
"You are good at doing things, and we are bad, okay? We admit it," said Cincinnati-area executive Robert Everhart, who belongs to the growing consortium of citizens desperately asking America's qualified people to take it from here. "So we're begging you, please grab hold of the…
sastyk | October 20, 2011On the 31st of October we will officially reach 7 billion people on the earth. Over the next week or two we'll be talking a lot about population issues, and I wanted to start by doing a light revision of an article I wrote some years ago about a concept a lot of people don't grasp very well - the idea of demographic transition and what it means.
The term "Demographic Transition" describes the movement of human populations from higher initial birth rates to a stabilzed lower one, and seems to be a general feature of most societies over the last several hundred years.
Initially, birth rates…
sastyk | October 16, 2011From David Leonhardt at the New York Times, a good, if very partial explanation of why the overall future of the US and the Global North generally doesn't look as promising as the 30s. See if you can guess what's missing from the article.
Still, the reasons for concern today are serious. Even before the financial crisis began, the American economy was not healthy. Job growth was so weak during the economic expansion from 2001 to 2007 that employment failed to keep pace with the growing population, and the share of working adults declined. For the average person with a job, income growth…
sastyk | October 16, 2011From Yale Environment 360, more questions about future UN population projections:
For now, we can indeed be highly confident that world population will top 7 billion by the end of this year. We're close to that number already and currently adding about 216,000 people per day. But the United Nations "medium variant" population projection, the gold standard for expert expectation of the demographic future, takes a long leap of faith: It assumes no demographic influence from the coming environmental changes that could leave us living on what NASA climatologist James Hansen has dubbed "a…
sastyk | October 10, 2011Last year at the 2010 ASPO conference (and over the years at other places) I've highlighted the connection between oil prices and food prices - and the ways that our increasingly tightly tied oil and food systems unravel together. If you missed these graphs last week, they'll give you the beginnings of the picture, but I can show you a few thousand more. In every conceivable way, we have worked to tie energy and food prices together - from our increasing reliance on globalized markets and shipping to our fertilizer dependence, to our growth in biofuel usage, to centralized meat production…
sastyk | October 10, 2011Perhaps the first widely read piece I wrote was entitled "Peak Oil is a Women's Issue" and focused on the ways that an energy decline might affect women. At the time it was written (the earliest version appeared in 2004) the peak oil movement was largely a group of men, mostly geologists, oil men, a few economists and journalists interested in a growing issue.
My argument (more refined variations of which I've continued making for years) was that women need to organize around energy and environmental issues, because they stand to lose a great deal in a society that has fewer resources to…
sastyk | September 23, 20111. To hang out with me, of course ;-).
2. To make your voice heard in Washington about this issue - because we don't have much time to begin to act, and every person here who says 'I care deeply about this' helps reinforce our message of the centrality of this issue.
3, To hear Wes Jackson talk about what we're going to eat in the coming decades.
4. To get the latest in the emerging story on Shale Gas reality.
5. Because where else can you hear Nicole Foss and Jeff Rubin arguing deflation vs. inflation in the hallways?
6. Because our future depends on getting the word out and we need your…
sastyk | September 20, 2011Aaron Newton and I are starting out our first-ever Advanced Adapting-in-Place class, for people who have taken our previous course or who have been on the adaptation journey for a while. If you'd like to join us there are still spots available and world enough and time to join, so please email me at jewishfarmer@gmail.com. In the meantime, the first step in sorting out what you need to do to get ready for a shifting future is to have some sense of what that future looks like - or the range of possible ways the future could look.
There are a lot of possible ways to imagine the future.…
sastyk | September 19, 2011Daniel Yergin in the Wall Street Journal:
Since the beginning of the 21st century, a fear has come to pervade the prospects for oil, fueling anxieties about the stability of global energy supplies. It has been stoked by rising prices and growing demand, especially as the people of China and other emerging economies have taken to the road.
This specter goes by the name of "peak oil."
Its advocates argue that the world is fast approaching (or has already reached) a point of maximum oil output. They warn that "an unprecedented crisis is just over the horizon." The result, it is said, will be "…
sastyk | September 15, 2011A few readers have asked me to comment on Goldman Sachs' prediction that the US will be the world's largest Oil producer in 2017. I am delighted to do so. Several possible comments come to mind.
1. Apparently Crystal Meth has become the trendy drug at Goldman.
2. How did the Yes Men get this published under Goldman's Name?
3. Goldman is apparently even less optimistic about Saudi oil production than I am. They think the depletion curve is going to be a straight line downwards.
4. Oh, wait, they are talking about "oil" not oil! That "oil" stuff is almost infinite - you can magically turn…
sastyk | September 14, 2011
Just watch, and understand why the death of what passed for culture in our youth is probably something we can bear with equanimity. Plus, the hair gave us a taste for the apocalyptic - the bangs are exactly what your hair will look like during a zombie attack.
Sharon
sastyk | July 4, 2011Almost all conversations with every other parent of late includes "Have you read Go the Fuck to Sleep yet? Have you heard Samuel Jackson read it?...." It is safe to say that the book touches a nerve. And it is extraordinarily funny, and it does evoke precisely the reactions that most of us have trouble acknowledging publically. We all have to ruefully acknowledge that we see some part of ourselves in this - the book is about those parenting failures that are hard to speak about but part of our lives.
It is, all in all, an awesome book, and precisely the sort of thing I wish (and I suspect…
sastyk | June 7, 2011Richard Glover has a very funny - and in many ways on-target analysis here.
Don't get me wrong - as I've said many times before, I know a lot of people who don't take climate change seriously, but who also recognize for various other reasons that we can't burn fossil fuels the way we are. I believe in the big tent. But there is something to be said for even metaphorically making people take ownership of their politics - and the implications of their politics.
I realize someone is going to be outraged by this - ah well, can't please everyone! I find it funny, not because I want to…
sastyk | May 24, 2011One of my many other hats is the one I wear as a member of the ASPO-USA board and editor of the Peak Oil Review Commentary. My favorite kind of commentary is the one that puts together short pieces from a lot of thinkers, all answering the same question - and this must be the favorite of a lot of people, because it has generated a tremendous response. Perhaps favorite response to the question "What are we missing? What part of our environmental/energy/economic crisis isn't getting enough attention?" was Nate Hagen's answer (only partly excerpted here):
Basically, though it's counter-…
sastyk | May 10, 2011Whenever I talk about going to lower energy usage, a percentage of people shout out something like "But that would mean going back tothe stone age, to lepers walking the streets and people throwing their feces out the window on our heads!!!" I think it is fair to say that variations on the "without power, life would be intolerable" is a common assumption.
Part of the thing that bothers me about it is that I don't think it is true. I've spent a lot of time studying history, and I don't think the lives of all of those in human history who preceeded us were intolerable. I am extraordinarily…
sastyk | May 4, 2011Far be it from me to laud cuts in spending on critical things like energy analysis...but I admit I can't work up a good head of steam about the cuts in the EIA budget. After all, the EIA has managed to consistently get it wrong on oil reserves. Here's what happened:
The final fiscal year (FY) 2011 budget provides $95.4 million for the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), a reduction of $15.2 million, or 14 percent, from the FY 2010 level.
"The lower FY 2011 funding level will require significant cuts in EIA's data, analysis, and forecasting activities," said EIA Administrator…
sastyk | April 25, 2011
Almost exactly four years ago, my friend Miranda Edel and I were discussing the recent IPCC report on Climate Change and George Monbiot's book _Heat_ and the reactions that we got when we talked about about the sheer depth of the reductions in climate emissions that would be needed to stabilize the climate. Whenever we began to discuss emissions reductions on the order of 80 or 90% (depending on your country of origin - for the US Monbiot's estimate was 94%, although there are reasons to question that number now), the universal reaction we got was that it was impossible - impossible to…
sastyk | April 17, 2011I'll be offline much of the next few days for the Passover holiday. This is a subject we're talking about in the Adapting-in-Place class, and one that comes up a lot - how do you make environmental changes with a spouse who isn't on board? What happens when this strains your marriage?
I get emails more or less constantly on this subject: "I want to prepare for peak oil/live more sustainably/change my life to deal with climate change and my spouse (and/or the rest of my family) don't want to, or don't think it is important enough."
This is something I've heard over and over - marriages…