Peak Oil News
11/26/2011
After 7 years of reading some voices crying in the wilderness about the coming oil depletion, it is nice to see the rest of the world, particularly the money people, become aware of the coming era. I found this video produced by FutureMoneyTrends.com to be particularly interesting as it hits on all the key production data and future ramifications of the End of the Oil Age. This mini documentary (10 minutes) encapsulates the entire raison d'etre for this blog site and for my own efforts in changing my suburban home into a space that 'fits' into an oil depleted civilization.
Further blog posts here will provide the wonky charts and graphs relating to the Peak Oil Event, but an excellent starting point in defining the problem is this small mini-documentary. Enjoy.
"Soon we believe...front yard vegetable gardens will replace grass..."
Yes, my favorite part, now they are getting the idea.
11/29/2011
The Oil Peak, the point where we can no longer produce enough conventional oil to meet demand, is past, and yet a large number of people go blissfully about their day with little or no thought to this event. If you are reading this I will ask you to do a little thought experiment.
Look around your room and identify how many items are made from oil. Then look at how many items were transported to your home with oil, then go look in your refrigerator and cabinets and think of the diesel fuel that was used to plant, fertilize, process and transport the food to your home.
If you perform this experiment honestly, taking say 20 minutes out of your busy day to think about OIL and how it touches every aspect of your life, you may feel a slight chill come over, a nervous anxiety that might arise when you understand that the Peak of global production...was in 2006.
Oil production is on a plateau now, neither rising much or declining much, and according to a few studies will most likely remain on this plateau for a few more years. Somewhere around the 2015 time frame oil production begins to go into permanent depletion. Permanent. Demand may outstrip production by 10% per year and prices will follow the obvious path upward.
This will not be a minor inconvenience of odd and even days for gasoline, or reduced thermostats but a permanent new condition of our society that no one alive has experienced. Every generation alive today has lived during a period of cheap and available liquid fuel. We have no living memory of a time when oil was not part of our daily life, nor do we have experience living in a society that does not rely on petroleum.
"The economists like to say that if you want more oil, drill more wells. It is quite possible that the coming crisis will indeed spawn another exploration boom, as people in ignorance of underlying resource constraints continue to live in the past, hoping that what worked before will work again. It won't. Instead some new thinking has to come into play."
- Colin Campbell
Oil Crisis 2005
ISBN: 0906522 39 0
Colin Campbell on Peak Oil
Before you shrug all of this off thinking that technology will find a way, or we will open up the Arctic, or somehow things will just work out, that the status quo will continue, realize that all of those things will happen except - the status quo will not continue. We are in for some serious changes over the next 20 years, the likes of which none of us have seen. New technologies will appear, we will at some point drill everywhere in desperation and yes, things will work out. But things will work out much more smoothly if we begin now a transition to a society with much less available energy. Things will work out if we each begin our own path to sustainable living. This isn't a 'feel good' moment, you won't get a gold star, you won't be fashionable and cool by doing this, but you just might be comfortable when oil is $300 a barrel.
OIL = FOOD
In our current industrial food system Oil=Food. The rest of this site is informed by that simple equation and although I don't expect to see empty supermarket shelves any time soon, securing a portion of my personal organic food supply as an offset to the inevitable increase in prices is just one of the benefits of my sustainable transition. It also helps to promote the 'new kind of thinking' that needs to come into play. It truly has been my experience that just the small act of planting a seed opens a new inner world where my connection to the underlying natural systems I ultimately rely upon breaks through the suburban noise and is revealed once again.
If you care to explore further, and I hope you do, here are some books and resources that I have found extremely helpful in my understanding of the energy future. Knowledge is power, knowing the reality of what is in store for us relating to oil guides my thinking in all of my future planning.
BOOKS
The Party's Over
Richard Heinberg
ISBN: 0-86571-482-7
The Long Descent
John Michael Greer
ISBN: 978-0-86571-609-4
The Long Emergency
James Howard Kunstler
0-87113-888-3
Oil Crisis
Colin Campbell
ISBN: 0906522 39 0
Beyond Oil (The View From Hubbert's Peak)
Kenneth S. Deffeyes
ISBN: 0-8090-2956-1
The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight
Thom Hartmann
ISBN: 1-4000-5157-6
A Thousand Barrels a Second
Peter Tertzakian
ISBN: 0-07-146874-9
Twilight In The Desert
Mathew R. Simmons
ISBN: 0-471-73876-X
$20 per Gallon
Christopher Steiner
0-446-54955-X
The Oil Factor
Stephen Leeb
ISBN: 0-446-69406-1
WEBSITES
Permaculture - Beyond Sustainabilty
ASPO International
ASPO - USA
Energy Bulletin
Post Carbon Institute
Current Oil price from Bloomberg
Power of Community
Preparing for Life in a Peak Oil World
End of Suburbia (documentary)
The exponential function explained. There will be Math, and cake.
Robert Hirsch explains why I am nervous
The famous Hirsch Report 2005
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