Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Oil supply optimists claim that new technology combined with private development of the world’s remaining oil resources–most of which are now under the control of government-owned companies–would vastly increase global oil production and put off any decline for decades. Texas oilman Jeffrey Brown isn’t buying it, and he cites the history of oil production in Texas and the North Sea to explain why.
Bill Gates is right that we need more funding, support, and attention applied to energy technology. But if we truly seek to fashion a sustainable future, we need just as much applied to laws, regulations, infrastructure, economics, behaviors, and values. We need to innovate a new way of being in the world, not just new tools.
President Obama has issued marching orders for the rapid national adoption of “clean coal” technology. Last week, shortly after his budget address, he ordered a high-level task force to deliver a plan within 180 days determining how “to overcome barriers to the widespread, cost-effective deployment of CCS within 10 years, with the goal of bringing 5 to 10 commercial demonstration projects on line by 2016.”
Derek’s book is a far cry from anything so conventional. He aims to inspire with his ideas, ideas that may well earn his book a place in tiny house history. What he ends up doing is reconstructing the mind into accepting what constitutes shelter. (Also “Build Your Own House”)
There is Successful Farming, Progressive Farming, Organic Farming, Natural Farming and an awful lot of Wishful Farming. I would like to add to the list one more kind: Impossible Farming.
– The Making of an Elder Culture
– Slow-tech: Manifesto for an overwound world
– Stuck accelerators: Toyotas and the fossil-fuel growth economy
– Energy flow, emergent complexity, and collapse
-Defusing the Methane Greenhouse Time Bomb
-Think-tanks take oil money and use it to fund climate deniers
-China: Prince of Denmark
-Loss Of Species Hits Economy
Jeff Rubin, former chief economist at Canadian investment bank CIBC World Markets, is not your typical economist. He gets peak oil…And now, in his bestselling book Why Your World Is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller, he argues that oil prices, temporarily dampened by the deepest post-war recession on record, will soon be vaulted to new highs as the economy begins to recover, which in turn will thrust the world into yet another recession right on the heels of this one.
This week saw the Chairman of one of the world’s major oil companies publicly acknowledge the approaching peak in oil production…
The American West at Risk’s 13 chapters examine some of the major human-caused environmental problems now threatening the 11 contiguous Western states…Citing trustworthy, peer-reviewed studies in support of its arguments, and written by three trained scientists, this book has every claim for credibility—and is an enlightening and gripping read for scientists and laypeople alike.
“as mankind proceeded to get bigger and bigger we silently crossed a threshold”
Henry Ford is famous for having once said, “History is more or less bunk.” He was, in fact, attacking tradition in an age of rapid technological and social change. Almost a century later we have a less ambitious observation which may not achieve the broad visceral appeal of Ford’s statement, but one which may turn out to have a good deal of importance, to wit: Oil and natural gas reserve numbers are more or less bunk.
