Peak Oil Links
Resources related to Positive Disintegration and Peak Oil
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Contents
The End is Nigh - Deepwater Horizon and the
Technology, Economics, and Environmental Impacts of Resource Depletion by Richard Heinberg
6/1/10 - The Deepwater Horizon
disaster reminds us that, of all non-renewable resources, oil best deserves to
be thought of as the Achilles heel of modern society. Without cheap oil, our
industrial food system—from tractor to supermarket—shifts from
feast to famine mode; our entire transportation system sputters to a halt. We
even depend on oil to fuel the trains, ships, and trucks that haul the coal
that supplies half our electricity. We make our computers from oil-derived
plastics. Without oil, our whole societal ball of yarn begins to unravel. But the era of cheap,
easy petroleum is over; we are paying steadily more and more for what we put in
our gas tanks—more not just in dollars, but in lives and health, in a
failed foreign policy that spawns foreign wars and military occupations, and in
the lost integrity of the biological systems that sustain life on this planet.
How Much Oil Is Left?:
interview with Richard Heinberg by Lars
Schall 4/7/10 - The reason it’s bad for both an
energy crisis and a financial crisis to occur together is that each makes the
other harder to address. Without adequate credit and investment capital, how
will we build renewable energy infrastructure to replace our current
fossil-fuel-dependent transport and electricity systems? And without cheap
energy, how can we dig ourselves out of a financial crisis? Both are indeed happening now, and this
should be no surprise given the inherent linkages between energy prices and the
health of the economy. Will we see global violence as a result? Of course I
hope the answer is “no,” but the likelihood of war would be substantially
reduced if the general public had a better idea of why their standard of living
is eroding. Since politicians don’t really understand what is happening, I
suppose they can be somewhat excused for not telling their constituents. But
that means that the most likely response will be a hunt for scapegoats. If the
world is to return to stability, an entirely new economic system, based on a
new and different form of money, will be required. The world still has willing
workers and consumers, and enormous productive capacity in the forms of
factories, soils, and recyclable materials. But without a functioning monetary
system, there will be no means of connecting production with consumption. Our
current money system requires constant growth so as to enable repayment of the
interest on the debts that created the money to begin with, so it cannot
function well in the context of general resource scarcity and
The Common Link with
Climate Change, Peak Oil, Limits To Growth, Etc. - Belief Systems by Nate Hagens 12/10/09 - Many of the issues discussed on this bandwidth are large, long
term, and threatening. Consider the three primary society-wide topics of
analysis and discourse: climate, energy and the economy. It is my belief these
3 are linked by an underlying cultural growth/debt imperative running into a
planet with finite sources and sinks. But within each category you have, still, despite the same access to facts
and considerable passage of time, widely disparate and strongly held opinions.
If you find yourself in a debate about any of these issues you'll find apathy
or you'll find cognitive biases underlying a polarized opinion. This post will address some social and
psychological reasons why the urgency of our resource situation may not be
being addressed on an individual level and only at a snails pace on the
governmental level. Among the phenomena we will explore are a) why we have beliefs and how they are changed,
b) our propensity to believe in authority figures, c) our penchant for
optimism, d) cognitive load theory, e) relative fitness, f) the recency effect,
and several others.
Hagbard's Law by John Michael Greer 12/2/09 - Hagbard’s
Law states that information can only be communicated between equals, since in a
hierarchy, those in inferior positions face very strong incentives to tell
their superiors what the superiors want to hear rather than the truth. The more
levels of hierarchy between the people who gather information and the ones who
make decisions, the more communication tends to be blocked by Hagbard’s Law; in
today’s governments and corporations, the disconnect between the reality
visible on the ground and the numbers viewed from the top of the pyramid is as
often as not total. [Greer applies
this law to debates about global warming and peak oil.] The global warming
story is the kind of story our culture loves to tell – a narrative about
human power. Look at us, it says, we’re so mighty we can destroy the world! The
peak oil story, by contrast, is the kind of story we don’t like – a story
about natural limits that apply, yes, even to us.
The End Of Electricity by
Peter Goodchild 10/26/09 - There seems to be a
consensus that the depletion of fossil fuels will follow a fairly impressive
slope. What may need to be looked at more closely, however, is not the
"when" but the "what." Looking at the temporary shortages
of the 1970s may give us the impression that the most serious consequence will
be lineups at the pump. Fossil-fuel decline, however, will also mean the end of
electricity, a far more serious matter.
Would
You Know How to Survive After the Oil Crash? by Tara Lohan 9/17/09 - Could you get by without your car,
food from outside your community, your job? There's a bunch of folks who want
to show you how.
Peak
Oil Day by Richard Heinberg 7/3/09 - On
July 11, 2008, the price of a barrel of oil hit a record $147.27 in daily
trading. That same month, world crude oil production achieved a record 74.8
million barrels per day. We are now approaching the first-year anniversary of
Peak Oil Day. Where are we now? The global economy is in tatters, yet oil
prices have recovered somewhat (they’re now about half what they were in July
2008). World energy consumption is down, world trade is down, the airline
industry is shrinking, and most of the world’s automakers are on life
support. It is too late to prepare
for Peak Oil—a year too late, in fact. Now the name of the game is
adaptation. We are in an entirely new economic environment, in which old
assumptions about the inevitability of perpetual growth, and the usefulness of
leveraging investments based on expectations of future growth, are crashing in
flames.
Peak
Oil And World Food Supplies by Peter Goodchild 6/29/09 - Only
about 10 percent of the world’s land surface is arable, whereas the other 90
percent is just rock, sand, or swamp, which can never be made to produce crops,
whether we use “high” or “low” technology or something in the middle. In an age
with diminishing supplies of oil and other fossil fuels, this 10:90 ratio may
be creating two gigantic problems that have been largely ignored. The first is that humans are not living
only on that 10 percent of arable land, they are living everywhere, while
trucks, trains, ships, and airplanes bring the food to where those people are
living. What will happen when the vehicles are no longer operating? Will
everyone move into those “10 percent” lands where the crops can be grown?
The Oil Intensity Of Food by Lester
R. Brown 6/25/09 - The prospect of peaking oil
production has direct consequences for world food security, as modern
agriculture depends heavily on the use of fossil fuels. Most tractors use
gasoline or diesel fuel. Irrigation pumps use diesel fuel, natural gas, or
coal-fired electricity. Fertilizer production is also energy-intensive. With
higher energy prices and a limited supply of fossil fuels, the modern food
system that evolved when oil was cheap will not survive as it is now
structured.
The
End of the Information Age by John Michael Greer 5/13/09 -
Prophets of an indefinite
expansion of today's "information society" too often forget that
information doesn't exist by itself; it requires a physical substrate, and if
that goes away, so does the information. As the age of cheap energy comes to an
end, relying on a substrate as energy-intensive as the internet may be a risky bet.
Post Carbon
Institute Manifesto: The Time For Change Has Come
Peak
oil means sooner or later we'll wake up to a new normal by Rex Weyler 2/26/09 - Peak oil, economic meltdown and climate change are
staring us in the face. Depressing? Only if one clings to the dream, unable
to fully wake up. To see the real solutions, we have to change the way we
understand the problem. This will demand a paradigm shift as dramatic as when
Copernicus pointed out that the universe did not revolve around the Earth. The
answer will be in localization, based less on foreign-made goods, debt, and
commuting, and more on friends, local food, and community cohesion. The new
normal will be about improving the quality of life without consuming more
stuff.
Peak
oil and the global economy by Clifford J. Wirth,
Ph.D. 2/2/09 - Citing respectable sources, Wirth offers a concise
summary of the consequenses of peak oil for the
global economy. The flaw in
the system was to treat a finite resource whose production was largely
controlled by the immutable physics of the reservoir as if it were a normal
commodity capable of responding to ordinary market pressures. If the price of
potatoes increases, farmers can grow more and the market responds, but oil is
different. The Government has evidently failed to grasp the underlying causes
of recession and hopes that pumping a bit of money into the system will restore
it to its previous condition. That was premised on eternal economic growth,
which is a somewhat unrealistic proposition for a Planet of finite dimensions,
but Governments subject to re-election are by nature short-term in their
thinking.
Peak Oil And The Century Of Famine by Peter Goodchild 1/5/09 - Around the beginning of the twenty-first
century, there began a clash of two gigantic forces: overpopulation and oil
depletion. The event went unnoticed by all but a few people, but it was quite
real. As a result of that clash, the number of human beings on Earth must one
day decline in order to match the decline in oil production. Unfortunately, there seems to be no way to get
those two giant forces into equilibrium in any gentle fashion, because in every
year that has gone by for the last few thousand years — and every year
that will arrive — the human population of Earth is automatically
adjusted so that it is roughly equal to the planet’s carrying capacity. Like so
many other animals, human beings always push themselves to the limits of that
carrying capacity. The Age of Petroleum made us no wiser in that respect, and in
fact dependence on fossil fuels has led us to a crisis far greater than any in
the past.
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The peak oil crisis: Civil unrest by Tom Whipple 12/31/08 - Before grappling with 2009, it
might be useful to remind ourselves that there is a dark side to what lies
ahead. Of all the world's nations, America is probably the worst prepared to
deal with deep, prolonged economic hardships, for more of us have disconnected
from 19th century, rural, somewhat self-sufficient, lifestyles than in most
other countries. In the 1930's many found that they could still return to the
family farm, where food, shelter, and meaningful work was available. In 2010
that option exists for very few; we have become dependent on a complex
The Power of the Nonrational by John Michael Greer 10/8/08 - Underlying the idea of peak oil
lies a sobering view of things. Peak oil is not a story about human power; it’s
a story about human limits. If the peak oil narrative is correct, the power we
claimed as our own was never really ours; we got it by breaking into the
earth’s treasure of stored carbon and burning it up in a few short centuries.
Despite the clichés, we never conquered nature; instead, we borrowed her assets
and blew them in a 300-year orgy of lavish consumption. Now the bills are
coming due, the balance left in the account won’t meet them, and the remaining
question is how much of what we bought with all that carbon will still be ours
when nature’s foreclosure proceedings finish with us.
Cassandra's View by John
Michael Greer 10/1/08 - The essence of the industrial
world’s crisis is that we no longer have the resources or the time to bring
about changes in our infrastructure or technology large enough to make a
significant difference on a national or international scale. We threw away that
opportunity when the industrial world abandoned the steps toward sustainability
taken in the 1970s. The quarter century from 1980 to 2005, when energy was
cheaper and more abundant than ever before in human history, could have been
used to launch the transition to sustainability, but that opportunity was
wasted – along with all those billions of barrels of oil – and all
the wishful thinking in the world will not bring either one of them back.
A
geopolitical tsunami: Beyond oil in world civilization clash by James Leigh 9/1/08 - Ominous signs of oil depletion are beginning to
appear, in fulfilment of “Peak Oil” theory. The
implications of increasingly scarce oil supplies are catastrophic for the
maintenance of industrial societies’ economic development, and the stark facts
of oil depletion herald considerable barriers to thwart the universalization of economic development to the less developed nations as oil prices skyrocket.
This may all come together to facilitate civilization clash, as each political
bloc frantically strives to secure the world’s oil resources, or at least the
reliable supply of oil at the best price. Cohering nations may forge
continent-wide civilization superpowers, for self advantage in the imminent new
worldwide post-oil era, when abundant and cheap supplies of oil cannot be taken
for granted. This may prove to be a contest of how the newly formed superpowers
will cooperatively work together or aggressively compete with each other.
Sorry, No Gas: Survival Strategies For The Post-Petroleum World By Peter Goodchild 8/24/08 - The main difference between America and previous
civilizations is that, from now on, the cycle of "civilization"
cannot be repeated. Oil is not the only mineral that will be in short supply in
the 21st century. In the future, after the collapse of the present
civilization, the necessary fuels and ores will not be available for that
gradual rebuilding of technology. The loss of both petroleum and accessible
ores means that history will no longer be a cycle of empires. But village life
has a way of transcending disasters.
The Tempo of Change by John
Michael Greer 8/20/08 - The
continuity of history as a lived experience imposes requirements on planning
for the post-peak future that haven’t always been noticed. Like the imaginary
lifeboat ecovillages that would make perfect economic
sense in an imagined world, but can’t even scrape together the funding to get
built in this one, a good many of the plans and projects that have been
discussed as a response to peak oil make no provision for the fact that people
will still have to live their lives and make a living while they wait for those
projects to justify themselves. Those projects that make good practical sense
here and now, or at least place no great burden on the people who choose to
pursue them, will be a good deal more viable than those that can only support
themselves in a radically different world than the one we inhabit.
Losing
control by Richard Heinberg 8/15/08 - The trajectory of our relationship
with control is about to change. With the end of cheap fossil fuels, and
therefore the end of cheap energy, our ability to control our environment
begins to wane. This of course has abundant practical implications, but also a
collective psychological, even spiritual impact.
Status
and Curiosity - On the Origins of Oil Addiction by Nate Hagens 7/7/08 - Just as an addict becomes
habituated to cocaine, heroin or alcohol, the 'normal person' possesses neural
architecture to become habituated via a positive feedback loop to the 'chemical
sensations' we receive from shopping, keeping up with the joneses (conspicuous
consumption), pursuing more stock options and profits, and myriad other
stimulating activities that a large social energy surplus provides. In order to
overcome addictions, it is usually not enough to argue about which year the
drug supply is going to begin its decline. It's a better path to understand the
addiction, admit it before one hits rock bottom, and either begin the cold
turkey process or become addicted to something else.
Portrait of an Oil-Addicted Former Superpower: How
Rising Oil Prices Are Obliterating America's Superpower Status by Michael T. Klare 5/8/08 - From
the end of World War II through the height of the Cold War, the U.S. claim to
superpower status rested on a vast sea of oil. As long as most of our oil came
from domestic sources and the price remained reasonably low, the American
economy thrived and the annual cost of deploying vast armies abroad was
relatively manageable. But that sea has been shrinking since the 1950s. When it
came to reliance on imports, the United States crossed the 50% threshold in
1998 and now has passed 65%. Though few fully realized it, this represented a significant erosion of
sovereign independence even before the price of a barrel of crude soared above
$110. By now, we are transferring such staggering sums yearly to foreign oil
producers, who are using it to gobble up valuable American assets, that,
whether we know it or not, we have essentially abandoned our claim to superpowerdom. As a result of our addiction to increasingly
costly imported oil, we have become a different country, weaker and less
prosperous. Whether we know it or not, the energy Berlin Wall has already
fallen and the United States is an ex-superpower-in-the-making.
Living
for the Moment while Devaluing the Future by Nate Hagens 6/1/07 (15 p.) - The
debate on the realities of both climate change and Peak Oil has moved from 'are
they real?' to questions concerning timing, magnitude and impact. At the same
time, expanding research in 'temporal discounting' in economics (called
'impulsivity' in psychology), is shedding light on how steeply we value the
present over the future, a trait that has ancient origins. Knowing this
tendency, how can we expect factual updates on peak oil and climate change to
behaviorally compete with Starbucks, sex, slot machines, and ski trips? (See
link for charts, graphs, and illustrations.)
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Oil Crisis Will Lead to 10-Year
Financial and Political Crisis Energy
Tech Stocks 2/7/08
Back
Up The Rabbit Hole by John Michael Greer 2/6/08
Running
on empty by Charles Russo 1/30/08
Shell
predicts energy shortage by 2015 1/26/08
Shell
Game, By Steve Alten, A
Review By Carolyn Baker
From
False to Real Solutions for Climate Change by Patrick Bond 1/6/08 Leave fossil fuels in the ground!
Peak Oil
And Dunbar's Number by Peter Goodchild 12/29/07
Agriculture:
closing the circle by John Michael Greer 12/19/07
Agriculture:
The Price of Transition by John
Michael Greer
12/12/07
Peak Oil
And The Vision In The Mirror by
Aaron Wissner 12/8/07
Give Thanks
for Oil - and OPEC by Kelpie Wilson 11/20/07
Is World Oil
Production Peaking? by Lester R. Brown 11/15/07
Oil
prices and responding to the strange lack of response by Jan
Lundberg 11/18/07
Peak Oil
And Silence by Peter Goodchild 11/16/07
Another Nail in the Coffin of the Case Against Peak Oil (PDF)
by
Matthew R. Simmons, Simmons International
11/16/07
Economic and
planetary collapse: Is it a therapeutic issue? by Kathy McMahon, Psy.D. 11/14/07
The
familiarity of an idea by
Sharon Astyk 11/15/07
Preparing for a Post-Peak
Lifestyle
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Triage for the
post-peak oil age by Kurt Cobb
Five Axioms of
Sustainability by Richard Heinberg
Tools with a life of their
own by Richard Heinberg
Fifty Million Farmers by Richard Heinberg
The View From Oil's Peak by Richard Heinberg
Facing
the New Dark Age: A Grassroots Approach by John
Michael Greer
The Plan by William Kötke
Intentional
community pioneer Albert Bates on surviving peak oil by Erik Curren 4/1/07
Another
Way by Joel
Achenbach
11/19/06 - On Earthaven Ecovillage and the
conundrum of energy use in contemporary America
Threats of
Peak Oil to the Global Food Supply by Richard Heinberg 6/05 - Food is energy. And it takes energy to get
food. These two facts, taken together, have always established the biological
limits to the human population and always will.
World Energy to 2050: A Half
Century of Decline by Paul Chefurka
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Energy
Bulletin - Peak Oil News
Post
Peak Living UnCrash Course
Sustainable
Post-Peak Livelihoods
Energy
Farms Network: Reliable Renewable Energy for a Post Carbon World - Energy Farms are a response to
the dominant agricultural model of the so-called “Green Revolution” that turns
soil to dust, chemicals to food, and food to fuel. They are experimenting with the
best practices from small-scale organic agriculture; trying out electric
tractors that can be powered by solar-generated electricity; and gathering the
hard data about what works well and what doesn't.
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| Cassandra by Grace Roselli |
The Archdruid Report by John Michael Greer
Culture Change by Jan
Lundberg
Resource Insights by Kurt Cobb
The Mountain Sentinel by
Dale Allen Pfeiffer
Chatelaine's Keys by
Sharon Astyk
Life After
the Oil Crash discussion forum on psychological & emotional
issues regarding Peak Oil
Clusterfuck Nation by James Howard Kunstler
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Crude: the Incredible Journey of
Oil
Global Public Media – Audio & Video interviews with Richard Heinberg, James
Howard Kunstler, Matt Simmons, Colin Campbell, and more.
"What a
Way to Go" - Meet the Filmmakers
Peak Moment: Calm Before the Storm 6/19/08 - Richard Heinberg, author
of “Peak Everything”, reviews the accelerating events since mid-2007, including
the credit crunch and fossil fuel price volatility, noting that we’ve missed
most of the best opportunities to manage collapse. He asks, “how far down the
staircase of complexity will our global civilization have to go until we’re
sustainable?” His answer: when managed properly, with deliberate
simplification, not as far as we might otherwise. In addition to long term efforts to relocalize our
economies, he advocates developing community “resilience” to withstand
short-term catastrophic events like food shortages or extreme weather. Noting
that healthy fear can move us into action, he encourages an attitude of
clarity, concern and informed action in this “calm before the storm” that he
feels is soon coming to an end. Audio or video, 27 min
Reality Report: Nate Hagens and the Maximum Power Principle 6/30/08 - Nate Hagens connects diverse topics such as energy supply,
economics, ecology and evolution, neuroscience, sociology and thermodynamics.
We begin by reviewing the global energy situation, and in that context ask if
the Maximum Power Principle (sometimes referred to as the fourth law of
thermodynamics) explains our apparent inability to recognize the true nature of
the crisis. At the end we discuss what the Maximum Power Principle implies for
how societies may chose, and be forced, to adapt to energy decline. Audio 1 hr.
Crude: The
Real Price of Oil - This riveting documentary by Joe Berlinger tells the epic story of one of the largest and most controversial legal cases
on the planet. An inside look at the infamous $27 billion Amazon Chernobyl
case, Crude is a real-life, high stakes legal drama involving global politics,
the environmental movement, celebrity activism, human rights advocacy,
multinational corporate power, and the fate of disappearing indigenous
cultures. These real characters and events play out on the screen like
a sprawling legal thriller. -- Stephen Holden, The New York Times
What a Way to Go: Life at the End of
Empire
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The Power of Community: How
Cuba Survived Peak Oil
The End of Suburbia: Oil Depletion and the
Collapse of the American Dream
Recipes for Disaster – A family tries to kick its oil addiction out of concern for global warming.
John
Michael Greer: The Long Descent: A User's Guide to the End
of the Industrial Age; and The Ecotechnic Future: Envisioning a Post-Peak World
Richard Heinberg: Peak Everything:
Waking Up to the Century Of Declines; The Oil Depletion Protocol: A Plan to Avert Oil Wars,
Terrorism, and Economic Collapse; Powerdown: Options and Actions for a
Post-Carbon World; and The Party's
Over: Oil, War, and the Fate of Industrial Societies
James Howard Kunstler: The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of
Oil, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the 21st Century.
Matthew
R. Simmons: Twilight in the Desert: The Coming Saudi Oil
Shock and the World Economy
Kenneth
S. Deffeyes: Beyond Oil: The View from Hubbert's Peak
Paul Roberts: The End
of Oil: On the Edge of a Perilous New World
Matt
Savinar: The Oil Age is Over: What to Expect as
the World Runs Out of Cheap Oil: 2005-2050
Julian
Darley: High Noon for Natural Gas
Pierre
Chomat: Oil Addiction- A World in Peril
David Strahan: The Last Oil Shock- A Survival guide to the Imminent
Extinction of Petroleum Man
John G. Howe: The End
of Fossil Energy and the Last Chance for Sustainability
Aric McBay: Peak Oil Survival: Preparation for Life After
Gridcrash
Julian Darley, David Room, Celine Rich: Relocalize
Now!: Getting Ready for Climate Change and the End of Cheap Oil
Dale Allen Pfeiffer: Eating
Fossil Fuels: Oil, Food And the Coming Crisis in Agriculture
Steve Solomon: Gardening When It
Counts: Growing Food in Hard Times
Albert Bates: The Post-Petroleum Survival Guide and Cookbook: Recipes for Changing
Times
Mick
Winter: Peak Oil Prep: Prepare for Peak Oil,
Climate Change and Economic Collapse
© 2010 Suzanne Duarte