ASPO
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 | 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 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 | October 12, 2011Lots of stuff to update you all on. First, the family expansion project - still nothing new. After three months of waiting, we've decided to expand our looking in a few different ways - our county just doesn't have a placement, and after all the work of getting ready, we're anxious to get one.
Meanwhile, I'm powering through the Adapting-In-Place Manual, and it will be out next spring. Here's a preview of the Cover:
Making Home Cover.pdf
I'm also getting ready for the ASPO-USA conference - where I'm going to be sharing a hotel room with Nicole Foss. We're going to have a late night…
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 | December 9, 2010It is claiming I don't have permission to embed it (I do, actually), so you can see the video here.
I gave this talk back at the beginning of October, in my conference as a member of the ASPO-USA Board. This was only the second time that ASPO has had a significant talk about the connection between food and agriculture, so instead of trying to make claims about how this may play out, I focused on what we already know to be true. As you all probably know, I think that we've barely begun to plumb the depths of the connections between food and energy. I will say, if I ever give a talk there…
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 | October 11, 2010First and foremost, thank you so much to John Bell, Molly Davis and Niepoliski for their aid and comfort while I was head down in the conference. I admit, I had no idea that I would be going every single second of each day, and running on quite so little sleep. I think realistically, being on the board and being able to blog the conference are fundamentally incompatible, and next year, I probably won't try it. But thanks to my friends and allies, you at least got the beginnings of a picture of what was happening. There's so much information being shared there - someone called it "like…
sastyk | October 9, 2010John reporting from the ASPO conference.
I first saw one of them when I was having an early dinner on the first day of the conference. A man in a yellow chicken suit was riding up one of the escalators. He didn't have the head on.
My wife came to town the second day to do some sightseeing at the Capitol while I remained entombed in the bowels of the hotel all day. When I first had a chance to talk to her, she told me how two people in chicken suits were handing out flyers outside of the hotel, one of which she took. Its title was "Oil Production: Is the Sky Falling? Or has the world…
sastyk | October 9, 2010The first day of the ASPO conference involved a lot of smaller sessions, most of which I missed because I was speaking or at the press conference and congressional briefing. The congressional briefing was a wild success - absolutely packed. The press conference was smaller (we were competing with the IMF and several other events) but the press follow up has been pretty good. Since what I care most about is ASPO's ability to extend the message out to the overwhelming majority of people who have no idea that their life is going to change, this was useful and interesting.
Day two (Friday)…
sastyk | October 6, 2010ASPO managed a real coup, getting an editorial in _The Hill_ (The Congressional Website) two days before our Congressional Briefing and Press Conference on Thursday. We're doing everything we can to bring the words "peak oil" into the public eye.
This is a great opportunity for you to make sure that your congressperson and their staffers know that you want them to pay attention to peak oil. First of all, you can and should comment at _The Hill_ : http://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/energy-a-environment/122627-runn…. The more comments that say something like "I'm concerned about peak…
sastyk | October 4, 2010I'm about to leave town. Oh, and I'm about to start my Adapting in Place Class. And I'm about to begin my new liveblogging project. And I have to clean the barn, vaccinate the goats, band two goats and get my life ready to run with only one adult. And do a lot of laundry. Oh, and I'm the only member of the ASPO board of directors anyone can reach right now (everyone else is in varying stages of transport), so I'm in charge, scary as that is. Gah!
Some notes: First, blog will not be quiet this week, but will be very busy! John, Molly and Shannon and possibly a couple of others, plus me,…
sastyk | September 30, 2010I know there has been a lot of ASPO posting right now - what can I say except it is consuming my entire existence, so it creeps into your blog posts too ;-). The fun part will come when the conference liveblogging begins and all that great information starts flowing!
But this is pretty awesome. A kind and wonderful donor has offered to subsidize three spots for people who would otherwise be unable to attend the conference. She'll pay for registration for three people - you do have to handle your own transport and find someplace to crash, but that seems achievable! You can hear all these…