Peak Oil
sastyk | April 4, 2011There's a very good piece in the Guardian about the ways that Eastern Japan's energy crisis is a model for experiences we might have in the future:
For large parts of eastern Japan that were not directly hit by the tsunami on 11 March 2011, including the nation's capital, the current state of affairs feels very much like a dry-run for peak oil. This is not to belittle the tragic loss of life and the dire situation facing many survivors left without homes and livelihoods. Rather, the aim here is to reflect upon the post-disaster events and compare them with those normally associated with the…
sastyk | April 1, 2011The Oil Drum has a well-referenced, thoughtful summary of the present situation at Fukushima - bad and getting worse as it gets harder and harder for workers to get close to the facility. The word "entombment" has been mentioned - which may be the only viable outcome. More than a million Japanese people risk losing their homes for a very long time, if not for good.
There are a lot of discussions of the future of nuclear power out there. Most of them don't assume declining other energy resources, however. The emerging assessment I see is that while modern nuclear plants are much safer,…
sastyk | March 17, 2011Some of you may know that a publisher contacted me last year about turning a piece of short fiction I'd written from an adult perspective into a young adult novel. There are several reasons I wanted to do this - the first is that in many ways, the young adult fiction market is much more vital than the adult fiction market - a lot of adults read YA fiction, while the reverse is rarely true. There's the potential to reach a large audience this way. The other, more important reason to me is simply that teenagers and young adults have to know about our future, and they need a vision of a…
sastyk | March 14, 2011"He'll never catch up!" the Sicilian cried. "Inconceivable!"
"You keep using that word!" the Spaniard snapped. "I don't think it means what you think it does."
..."Inconceivable!" the Sicilian cried.
The Spaniard whirled on him. "Stop saying that word!" It was inconceivable that anyone could follow us, but when we looked behind, there was the man in black. It was inconceivable that anyone could sail as fast as we could sail, and yet he gained on us. Now this too is inconceivable, but look - look" and the Spaniard pointed down through the night. "See how he rises."
The man in black was,…
sastyk | March 10, 2011In January of 2007, Aaron Newton, my friend and co-author of A Nation of Farmers came to Albany for four days of intense work on our book. We barely ate, slept or left the house, since we knew it would be the only chance the two of us had to hash everything out. Perhaps the single most intense moment for me, at least, was the conversation Aaron and I had about the central chapter of the book - the one that answered the question "Can we actually feed the 9+ billion people expected to live on this planet without lots of fossil fueled inputs?" This was the question answered by Tuesday's…
sastyk | March 8, 2011Today is the 100th Anniversary of International Women's Day, founded to celebrate the achievements of women. Founded in Europe to advocate for greater participation of women in the public sphere, International Women's Day focuses heavily on those public sphere accomplishments of women - as political leaders, in education, in activism. Those are important and powerful things, the more important because most of us still have visceral memory of women's past. Consider this Guardian interview with women talking about what has changed in their lifetimes.
At the same time that we speak about the…
sastyk | March 4, 2011Over the years I know a lot of people who have asked whether I get frustrated with other people's denial about energy and environmental issues. I do, but most of the time I'm pretty good at not allowing it to get to me. Yesterday, however, I just snapped. After a phone conversation with a news reporter who has every reason to understand peak oil and climate change but seems to decline to, I lost it. If everyone else - from the media to the president to Joe Bob down the street gets to live in denial and ignorance, how come I don't? It seems like such a happy place.
I determined that I too…
sastyk | February 28, 2011I had been mulling over precisely how to frame this piece for a while, when I read Erik Lindberg's "This Is a Peak Oil Story." which admirably gets at the essential point that I've been wanting to make - that our collective crisis comes to all of us at different times and different ways than we imagined, and that exemptions are only rarely granted. Lindberg writes eloquently of his own experience of trying to undertake change - and failing in large part because of the precise circumstances he is trying to address:
I had imagined the rooftop farm thriving far into the future. Here, my…
sastyk | February 25, 2011The phrase "oil shock" is being thrown around a lot in the national news, and events in Tripoli at the moment seem to be reinforcing the idea that we're facing an extended period of instability, and possibly a new cycle of oil price increases and the stress on personal and public economies that accompany rising prices.
Is this a given? No, but there are similarities here to prior experience. The most important point is that while everyone notes that Libyan oil is less than 2% of world consumption, that supply constraints don't have to be significant, or even present in order to cause a…
sastyk | February 24, 2011Two good recent articles on the implications for oil prices and production of the situation in Libya. First, Tom Whipple's always cogent overall analysis:
While the 1.6 million barrels a day (b/d) that the Libyans pumped in January may not appear significant in a world that produces some 88 million barrels each day, we should remember that those barrels are being consumed somewhere in a world where they are consumed just as fast as they are produced. If there is anything that we have learned in the last 40 years, it is that relatively small disruptions in oil production can lead to…
sastyk | February 10, 2011
(Yes, I will eventually explain this ;-))
I don't usually participate in the Huffington Post bashing that goes on at science blogs. Not because I don't often agree with it, but because my colleagues seem to have it covered when it comes to autism/vaccine links and dubious medical studies. Still, Raymond Learsy's column about Wikileaks did catch my attention, and it seems to have all the best qualities of a bad HuffPo piece.
If it's in Wikileaks, it's got to be true. Certainly it was a moment of triumphal satisfaction for the Peak Oil Pranksters. There it was in "cloud" black and white…
sastyk | February 9, 2011It was only a matter of time - Bart Anderson of Energy Bulletin even predicted it in the ASPO-USA predictions piece I put together this December! From the Guardian:
The US fears that Saudi Arabia, the world's largest crude oil exporter, may not have enough reserves to prevent oil prices escalating, confidential cables from its embassy in Riyadh show.
The cables, released by WikiLeaks, urge Washington to take seriously a warning from a senior Saudi government oil executive that the kingdom's crude oil reserves may have been overstated by as much as 300bn barrels - nearly 40%.
The revelation…
sastyk | January 31, 2011Stuart Staniford has a terrific piece that offers a little visual clarity about food, energy, unemployment and the Riots in the Middle East and North Africa:
Tunisia is a minnow in the global oil market, Egypt slightly more important. Algeria, however, matters a lot as its oil production is probably close to total demonstrated OPEC spare capacity. Thus serious social instability in Algeria would have major effects on global oil prices. If instability spread to bigger oil producers than that (eg Kuwait or UAE), the effects could be very dramatic.
Presumably, the regimes in those countries…
sastyk | January 5, 2011In my recent essay "300 Years of Fossil Fuels and Not One Bad Gal" I wrote:
...a narrative in which women's entry in the workforce is responsible for our dramatic rise in fossil fuel consumption and carbon emissions can look superficially like a tool for those who would prefer that women go back home and come out of the workforce, and would like to blame feminists and feminism for our present ecological disaster. Indeed, if no one has come up with this ideological claim yet, I'm sure it is only a matter of time before someone explains earnestly to me how wimmen's rights are destroying the…
sastyk | December 17, 2010If you haven't seen this video by Richard Heinberg and the Post Carbon Institute, you should. In a lot of ways it is an excellent summary of the history of fossil fuels, entertainingly and creatively done. In some ways, it is extremely valuable as a basic educational piece.
I'm very impressed with the clarity of this video, but it does have an odd gap in it - all of the human history of 300 years of fossil fuels doesn't have a single female person in it - not one. Women are addressed by implication when population is mentioned - but all the little hand-drawn people are men. There is a…
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 23, 2010I hope my readers will forgive me today for lapsing back into my prior profession rather than my present one as an energy and environmental writer. You see, before I gained fame and fortune writing about our ecological situation, I was a mild-mannered college teacher, whose favorite and most important job was teaching rhetoric to undergraduates.
I am perhaps odd in observing that I thought that teaching writing was the most important thing I did. Most academics believe their primary subject matter is the central portion of their work, but I came to see that the place that I had the greatest…
sastyk | November 23, 2010The always-brillliant and funny Christine Patton aka The Peak Oil Hausfrau, in the latest Peak Oil Review Commentary, has turned her sights to the IEA's recent predictions, managing to properly skewer both the IEA's predictions and the predictive value of economic modelling (two great tastes that taste great together!):
The International Economics Agency today released its World Income Outlook, which predicts a 564 percent increase in the median world income over the next three months. IEA Chief Economics Officer Brandon Blighted explains, "Our meticulous research clearly shows that an…
sastyk | November 16, 2010PANRC, by the way, is the acronym for "Post-Apocalyptic Novel Reading Club" pronounced by those in the know (ie, the person who just made this up 3 seconds ago) as "Panric" ;-). And while December's selection (we'll start on 12/1), Jim Kunstler's _The Witch of Hebron_ has been out for a bit, Kurt Cobb's _Prelude_ (which is, in fact, an immediately pre-apocalyptic novel) is now out. YAY!!!!
I've read _Prelude_ and besides the fact that I think it is fun and readable - a peak oil novel someone might actually read for fun - I think what Cobb is doing is important and I want to support it.…
sastyk | November 3, 2010The election is over and the results are depressing, much as expected - it was not a good night for anyone who believes that the most important work of government in hard times will be protecting ordinary people. This is a stretch to imagine at the best of times, and this was not them.
There's a larger question, however, that emerges out of the ashes of our usual political self-incineration - what will ordinary people will do with their fear now that the election is over?
Over the last few weeks, a series of articles have emerged that observe that the language of voter anger, so ubiquitous…