Peak Oil, Ten or So Years On

This blog began seven years and almost a thousand posts ago, and I thought it a good time to take stock. Since the blog itself was inspired by the “peak oil” movement, and since it’s been ten years, by some measures, since the peak, I wanted to assess the state of that community as well. […]

Teaching Peak Oil to 6th Graders

Teaching Peak Oil to 6th Graders

The Peak Oil Crisis: Have We Reached the Peak

Events never play out the way one expects. It is now over ten years since the modern concept of peak oil arose among the rapid oil price increases that took place in the mid-2000’s. Instead of an oil shortage that many expected we would be seeing by now, the world is in the midst of […]

Peak Oil: Familiar Patterns

When you read the literature and compare the arguments as laid out by the two sides, the Peak Oil argument is characterized by logic, rigor, data and hard science – just like the global warming argument a few years back – and the opposing side is characterized by, well, by unbounded faith that markets always […]

The Next Crime Wave in Farm Country: Stealing Water

Madera County sits smack in the middle of the state, and it’s mostly farms. As in many parts of the Valley, wells have gone dry here and water prices have soared. Thieves, who’ve been increasingly targeting rural farms, are starting to understand that anything water-related is a potential bonanza. “They’re taking the water hoses, taking […]

The Burden of Denial

It occurred to me the other day that quite a few of the odder features of contemporary American culture make perfect sense if you assume that everybody knows exactly what’s wrong and what’s coming as our society rushes, pedal to the metal, toward its face-first collision with the brick wall of the future. It’s not […]

“Peak Oil” Theory May Have Peaked

There are various versions of the “peak oil” theory, but for decades it garnered high-fives because it had been right about the U.S. Specifically, geophysicist M. King Hubbert published a theory of oil field development in 1956 that predicted total U.S. oil production would “peak” by about 1971 (at the latest) after which it would […]

A mostly Muslim world

The writer is an attorney teaching constitutional law and political philosophy. By the year 2030, Pakistan will overtake Indonesia as the largest Muslim country in the world. This and other notable demographic trends were announced by the Pew Research Centre in its latest survey, The Future of World Religions: Population Growth and Projections 2010-2050. The […]

Communities that Abide Revisited

My tropical wanderings have taken me to the exact same spot where I was last year, when I took the photograph that ended up on the cover of the book Communities that Abide: I took a number of pictures of this tree, during different times of day, until I got the one I wanted: the […]

Peak Oil: A Day Early Is Better

Shortsighted as a strategy is … well, shortsighted. Too bad that’s not the worst that can be said about it. Good to know that in my unexpectedly long absence away from posting that not much has changed, price drops and production numbers notwithstanding…. Fossil fuel and utility interests, concerned about the rise of cheap clean […]

Transitioning from Transition US

It is with mixed feelings that I share the news that I will be moving on from my role at Transition US. I will be shifting to focus on another area of community resilience, working at the local Department of Health Services.  My last two years as Co-Director of Transition US have been full of […]

The Biochar Moment

“”You want to be a billionaire? Solve a billion-person problem.”  — Peter Diamandis”   photo by Doug Clayton We are meeting with government officials of X country. X has a serious dilemma, one which is not uncommon in this era, and which will become the norm for most countries very soon. X is throwing vast […]

What If the Oil Runs Out?

Peak oil, an event based on M. King Hubbert’s theory, is the point in time when the maximum rate of extraction of petroleum is reached, after which the rate of production is expected to enter terminal decline. Peak oil theory is based on the observed rise, peak, (sometimes rapid) fall, and depletion of aggregate production […]

Heinberg: AFTERBURN Society Beyond Fossil Fuels

The advent of fossil fuels changed the world profoundly (giving us everything from plastics and automobiles to global warming); the inevitable and rapidly approaching end of the oil-coal-and-gas era will likewise bring overwhelming transformation in its wake. My new book Afterburn explores that transformation—its opportunities and challenges—in sixteen essays that address subjects as varied as […]

Is Peak Oil for real?

Is peak oil a thing… This is like asking is Gravity a thing… Of course it’s a thing. We use a lot of friking oil. The earth is a finite source of oil. It takes millions of years for oil to be created. A two year old could tell you that we are eventually going […]

Too Much Oil

We tend to associate oil and crisis with high prices and scarcity. Yet when prices plummet — as they have over the last few months — it creates a different kind of problem for oil producers. As this shock reverberates through the state coffers of Russia and Venezuela, and the oil fields of Texas and […]

Logic Of Power

We’re not trying to live like our ancestors, but to do something totally new: to preserve the most helpful complex technologies, while shifting to a political and economic system where power is fully shared. — Ran Prieur It seems like ages ago when I wrote about the logic of power. To sum up that post, […]

The Peak Oil Crisis: The Mother of All Black Swans

Even Saudi Arabia’s oil minister is starting to talk about the advent of a “black swan.” These are defined as completely unexpected developments which cause lots of unexpected change. I believe we are going to be seeing a major black swan event in the not too distant future. It should be clear to everyone that […]

What we can still learn from “Star Trek”: a saga of harmony in diversity.

The death of Leonard Nimoy, the actor who impersonated Mr. Spock in the original TV series  “Star Trek” has ended an age. Star Trek was a true 20th century saga, a way of seeing the world. To some of us, it may look completely obsolete, today, but it must have been telling us something deep; […]

Peak oil explained with cartoons

Humor and peak oil

The Peak Oil Crisis: An Update

A lot has happened to the global oil industry in recent months. First it is important to understand that the concept of “peak oil,” the time when global oil production starts to decline, is alive and well despite the current, and very temporary oil glut. Conventional oil, the kind that comes shooting out of wells […]

A review of James Kunstler’s The Long Emergency 10 years later

When James Howard Kunstler’s The Long Emergency came out in 2005, it was at once terrifying and riveting, like a nightmare whose outcome must be discovered despite the difficulty of braving through it. A chorus of critics praised Kunstler’s erudition and wonderful writing, while stressing that his book thoroughly unsettled them. (One reviewer declared that […]

Max Weber on energy and industrial civilisation

The German sociologist, philosopher, and political economist Max Weber (1864-1920) is often cited, with Émile Durkheim and Karl Marx, as among the three founders of sociology. Weber is best known for his contention that ascetic Protestantism was the driving force behind market-driven capitalism and the rational-legal nation-state in the West. Against Marx’s “historical materialism”, Weber emphasised […]

Industry response to peak oil not enough long term

President and Vice President, Illinois Renewable Energy Association We were asked recently if peak oil remains an issue. Just as cold weather stimulates doubt regarding climate change the current low price of oil stimulates doubt about peak conventional oil. Such short-term anomalies confuse the public and bring out a new round of denials regarding the […]

The Illusionary Recovery Is Now Giving Way To The Economic Collapse

ADP employment number miss expectations. RBS, Target laying off people. Deflation not showing up in food, alcohol or electricity. New type of loans, landlord loans, real estate market crashing and the bankers are getting desperate. FCC wants to be the referee of the internet. China tells Obama to mind his own business about fighting terrorism. […]

Peak Meaninglessness

Last week’s discussion of externalities—costs of doing business that get dumped onto the economy, the community, or the environment, so that those doing the dumping can make a bigger profit—is, I’m glad to say, not the first time this issue has been raised recently.  The long silence that closed around such things three decades ago […]

Modern Life Is Probably Screwed by Peak Oil, But It’s Not Too Late to Avoid Mass Starvation

The challenge of feeding 7 or 8 billion people while oil supplies are falling is stupefying. It’ll be even greater if governments keep pretending that it isn’t going to happen. By George Monbiot I don’t know when global oil supplies will start to decline. I do know that another resource has already peaked and gone […]

The Gifts Of Grief In A Time Of Endings

As with so many topics in this culture, near-term human extinction (NTHE) has become yet another issue for the debating society of the “cerebesphere”—a term I have coined for living only in the domain of the intellect while disconnected from the body and emotions. It seems that humans would much rather argue about whether they […]

Why Peak Oil Predictions Haven’t Come True

I’ve written about the myth of “peak oil” for at least eight years — every year brings new evidence against the prophecies of the doomsayers and yet every year their faulty premises require debunking. As I said in 2006 (“Oil is Well: The Shortage is a Myth, and Not a New One“): “The left consistently underestimates the power of […]

Have You Done the Transition Health Check Yet?

Believe or not the Transition Health Check is not about measuring everyone’s blood pressure in your Transition group or seeing how fit you all are. It’s actually a great tool for you to use to see how your group is doing, one that many Transition groups have already found to be really useful. It is […]

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