Peak Oil
lborkowski | October 18, 2010Earlier this month, I was able to attend the final day of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil & Gas (ASPO) USA conference, and it reminded me how far behind we are in preparing for a future in which oil is less readily available than it is now.
Sharon Astyk, who's an ASPO board member, wrote a helpful Peak Oil 101 post that walks through the concept in some detail, but the basic issue is that there's a finite quantity of oil in the world, and at some point the rate of global oil extraction will slow. We may have already reached that point, or we may reach it in a decade or so. The…
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 7, 2010Can a movement with the truth on its side abandon dry numbers for truthiness?
by guest blogger Molly Davis
**Hi guys! Sorry, this isn't much of an intro, but I hope you like the blog!**
Today's ASPO-USA conference in Washington, DC, is by far populated with people who support the idea that oil and gas supplies (or at least our ability to access them without serious environmental impacts) are peaking and that the results will prove both economically and socially disruptive.
But among this group, almost all of the messaging experts say the movement's narrative has failed to influence…
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, 2010The always-brilliant "Peak Oil Hausfrau" Christine Patton has a wonderful piece addressing the calm and reasoned Roman response to the recent "Foreign Barbarian Invasions: Impacts, Mitigation and Risk Management" report.
Proponents of the so-called "barbarian invasion" theory today warned of the "potentially disastrous" effects of hundreds of thousands of Visigoths, Huns, and Vandals plundering the imperial capital, including death, despoilment and dismemberment of the populace, and destruction of the city's ancient architecture and temples.
Senator Titus Claudius scoffed at the authors of…
sastyk | September 27, 2010Every so often someone comes up to me with fiery eyes and raring for a battle and says "I don't believe in Peak Oil" or "I don't believe in Climate Change." When this happens, I think they expect me to argue with them, and I do. But isn't the argument they expect - my standard response, correct almost 100% of the time is not to make the case for peak oil or climate change, but to argue "Yes, you do, in fact, believe in them."
Telling other people what they believe is a chancy business, but I feel reasonably confident in doing so, because when someone says they don't believe in peak oil or…
sastyk | September 3, 2010Let us start with persona, since one goes to any prizefight to see the metaphorical battle of two created characters, embodying sides, virtues, faults.
In this Corna... John Michael Greer, owner (by a whisker over Bob Waldrop) of the finest beard in Peak Oildom, Archdruid, moral descendent of Toynbee and Gibbon, considerer of declines in centuries, not weekends. No Zombies for Greer - we are Rome, and we might as well deal with it, dammit.
And in this Corna...Rob Hopkins, beardless founder of the Transition movement, permaculturist, endless energetic optimist and municipal leader, student…
sastyk | September 2, 2010Der Spiegel reports that it has obtained a German military think tank's analysis of peak oil's implicatons - and that the implications of the report are that the German government sees a peak oil scenario as potentially serious and likely enough to require attention:
The issue is so politically explosive that it's remarkable when an institution like the Bundeswehr, the German military, uses the term "peak oil" at all. But a military study currently circulating on the German blogosphere goes further.
The study is a product of the Future Analysis department of the Bundeswehr Transformation…
sastyk | August 30, 2010I give a lot of credit to people who try and make peak oil and climate movies - trying to overcome the natural impulse of most people to say "Let's not go see that movie about how we're all doomed, instead, let's go see The Expendables" is one of those tilting at windmill things I admire. The problem is that even your doomy blogiste here would probably rather watch a decaying Sylvester Stallone than sit through most of the movies. No matter how thoughtful and well told, nothing is going to get your Grandmother or your 19 year old nephew who likes explosions to sit through _The End of…
sastyk | August 17, 2010The IEA is the bestest agency in the world at admitting peak oil without actually admitting peak oil. They've now achieved a record - three years in a row of precisely matching the language and predictions of the peak oil community without actually saying the words. Matthew Wild points out the incredible overlap:
According to the IEA's latest Oil Market Report, published August 11, global demand will reach 86.6 million barrels per day in 2010, and then 87.9 million barrels per day in 2011, assuming a continuing global economic recovery. This means demand is set to pass the all-time high of…
sastyk | August 11, 2010I didn't know Matt Simmons personally, and after some of his frankly ridiculous claims about what was happening in the Gulf, I am a little ambivalent about writing about his demise. One is supposed to speak well of the dead, and while I think some of his work on the Gulf (including his early claims that the flow rates from the well were much higher than were reported, which was entirely correct) was good, some of it was inappropriate fearmongering, and that shouldn' be glossed over.
At the same time, however, I think Simmons deserves to be remembered for his most stunning accomplishment -…
sastyk | July 28, 2010Pursuant to my previous post, today's project in the decision making process for Eric and I (we'll finally see the inside of the house tomorrow) is to find how long the commute to Eric's job and our synagogue is. These two things make up about half of our total driving - only half simply because we are very fortunate, and Eric has managed to work his academic schedule so he's only on campus three days per week.
We realized last night that the house is further from SUNY Albany and our synagogue in Niskayuna than we'd realized - we'd figured it would be about the same since the house is only…
sastyk | July 13, 2010"How did you get there, Roo?" asked Piglet.
"On Tigger's back! And Tiggers can't climb downwards, because their tails get in the way, only upwards, and Tigger forgot about that when we started, and he's only just remembered. So we've got to stay here for ever and ever - unless we go higher. What did you say, Tigger? Oh, Tigger says if we go higher we shan't be able to see Piglet's house so well, so we're going to stop here."
-AA Milne, "The House At Pooh Corner"
Note: I wrote this essay several years ago, and have been thinking about it a lot in relationship to the BP problem, so I…
sastyk | June 29, 2010This weekend in the Washington Post, there's an article about a couple who first met while serving in various capacities during WWII, who just celebrated their marriage in DC this weekend after a "62 year engagement." This would be a romantic story in any context - but it isn't a story of parted lovers who finally found each other again after decades apart. Instead, it is of two men who have lived a life almost wholly together, sharing work, family and community, but who lacked legal and social recognition.
What's interesting about this story to me is not simply that it is a charming love…
sastyk | June 21, 2010Jon Stewart somehow seems to grasp the real importance of Obama's speech:
The Daily Show With Jon Stewart
Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
An Energy-Independent Future
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If only we'd thought about getting off oil before! But at least the dinos didn't die in vain!
The good news is that GWB is probably right - we won't be using as much foreign oil in 2025.
Sharon
sastyk | June 16, 2010In 2006 when I first met Julian Darley, author of _High Noon for Natural Gas_ and the founder of the Post-Carbon Institute, the world was excited by then-famous "Jack" oil field find in the Gulf of Mexico. Both of us were watching the way the world was interpreting the data - people were claiming that there might be 10, 12, 15 billion barrels of oil - five miles down underneath the ocean. The media was excited, ignoring the fact that large oil field potential reserves are routinely revised - and almost always downwards. The public and the media, without enough knowledge of oil production…
sastyk | June 14, 2010I spent my weekend in Washington DC with folks from the Association for the Study of Peak Oil, talking about the future of peak oil research and advocacy. It was an interesting weekend, but for a farmgirl who spends most of her waking hours during the summer outside and working in the dirt, it was a strange weekend. Two hermetically sealed 8 hour train journeys to Washington and 48 intense hours in a equally hermetically sealed hotel gave you that "I'm in the Matrix" feeling.
I admit, I don't sleep well in a room with windows that don't open and such, and even though I could have technically…
sastyk | June 9, 2010Gotta love Richard Heinberg's latest - suggestions for Oil Exec quotes on peak oil:
"We believe fears about Peak Oil to be . . .
a. unsupported by evidence.
b. utter rubbish emanating from cretinous doomsday cultists.
c. compellingly credible.
d. strangely arousing.
"People have been forecasting the end of oil . . .
a. for decades.
b. since the age of the dinosaurs--no, since the Big Bang.
c. with ever-greater urgency--especially since 2005, the year of maximum world crude oil production so far.
d. just to tick me off.
"Such predictions have always…
sastyk | June 7, 2010You learn pretty quickly to adjust for what any mainstream media says about peak oil and anyone who does any kind of preparation. Consider the case of my friend Kathie Breault who has appeared in various newspaper and television accounts. Kathie is grandmother, a midwife and a permaculturist, and about the least "survivalist" person you can imagine. She knits stuff for her grandkids and teaches them to garden, rides her bike everywhere and is starting up a homebirth midwifery practice, helping women with little access to good health care give birth safely. And yet in an ABC Nightline…
sastyk | June 2, 2010Definitely read the whole thing
More importantly, the two disasters are analogous in the unprecedented technical, administrative, and political challenges posed by their remediation. In the case of Chernobyl, the technical difficulty stemmed from the need to handle high level radioactive waste. Chunks of nuclear reactor fuel lay scattered around the ruin of the reactor building, and workers who picked them up using shovels and placed them in barrels received a lethal radiation dose in just minutes. To douse the fire still burning within the molten reactor core, bags of sand and boron were…