ASPO-USA
sastyk | April 3, 2012Check out ASPO-USA's first webinar, with Art Berman. Note that full membership will get you the whole webinar series. It is coming up on Thursday, so don't delay!
Sharon
sastyk | December 8, 2011Megan Quinn Bachman has a fabulous piece on the problem of net energy ignorance. Megan followed a group of ASPO attendees who visited congressional offices to talk about peak oil, and found pretty much what you'd expect - but what you'd expect has serious consequences:
During our congressional briefings, it felt like we were the ones slamming our heads against the wall. We were told that:
-Ethanol could free America from its dependence upon foreign oil (while at the conference chemical engineer and energy analyst Robert Rapier noted that turning all arable land in the world into biofuels…
sastyk | October 30, 2011Between now and 4:30 Tuesday morning, I have to get 1 extraordinarily cute lion, three vikings and a clown ready for Halloween (the Vikings are going to pillage a neighboring town with two of their best friends, the other two are just trick or treating), do a few dozen errands, shovel out the snow, vaccinate 32 goats, take said lion, vikings and clown to demand sugar as fealty from various people, pack and try and have enough of my book draft done so that my editor doesn't kick my ass from here to British Columbia when she sees me. So I'm guessing I won't be posting much.
I'll try and do…
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 | 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 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, 2011The only travel I'm doing this fall is for the November 2-5 ASPO-USA conference. Among the speakers will be:
Me ;-)
Wes Jackson
Dmitry Orlov
Richard Heinberg
Jeffrey Brown
John Michael Greer
Jeff Rubin
Aaron Newton
Bob Hirsch
Chris Martenson
Michael Klare
William Catton
Charley Maxwell
Lester Brown
Naomi Davis
Jean Laherre
And a whole lot more. Check out the full lineup here..
Also, remember for Saturday afternoon there will be a FREE open conference for teachers and youth/students working on peak oil issues, featuring some of these amazing people and some cool others to be announced. We're…
sastyk | August 2, 2011Well, the astrophysicist and I finally managed to write something together. More than a year and a half ago when I moved to Scienceblogs I promised that Eric would be my sometime- collaborator. I promise I did not realize was a total lie. You see, the way we've managed over the years to raise four kids, run a farm and work several jobs is that we trade off responsibilities - when I'm working in front of the computer, he's with the kids or working the farm. When he's at work teaching, I'm home doing the same. Yes, we do have evenings together after the kids go to bed, but what we found is…
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 | November 30, 2010In a perfect world, perhaps we'd all have already made our own homemade gifts for everyone, but most of us aren't that perfect. Many of us need to acquire some gifts, and the challenge is how to spend our money well, in things that are valuable, lasting and worth having. Over the course of the month, I have some suggestions for what sources you might go to for good gifts. I try, generally speaking, to put my own money where my mouth is, so all of these are places that my family has donated to, or will be donating to this year. There are a lot of good causes, and I'll have more than one…
sastyk | July 26, 2010Once upon a time, I advised people looking for a peaceful and happy future to choose land under which there were no energy resources. I should have taken my own advice - I'm on the fringe of the Marcellus Shale and the discussion and debate is becoming heated here. Like everyone, I don't particularly want a natural gas flare and dig across the road from me, but that alone wouldn't be enough to make me object - they have to drill somewhere, and Americans use a lot of energy. NIMBYism itself isn't sufficient. What's much more important is that I'm not convinced that the results will be…
sastyk | July 7, 2010I'd been planning to write this post for several days, and then late last night, got a nasty surprise that changed the focus of it for me. By now many of you will have heard that Pepsi bought a blog on science blogs and is using to to establish credibility by writing a blog focused ummm...on food and nutrition. Note long pause for your comments...feel free not to censor.
Let me be clear - my fellow science bloggers and I were blindsided on this - there was no advance notice, and let's just say that a lot of us are pretty pissed. All of us suffer credibility hits here, but for me and the…