Banff Transition

The Oil Drum: “Numerous theories attempting to explain business cycles have been posited over the past century… they all share one implicit assumption: a return to a growing economy, i.e. growing GDP, is in fact possible.… But if you believe as I do that the world is entering a unique period defined by flattening and then declining oil supplies, then for the first time in history we may be asked to grow the economy while simultaneously decreasing oil consumption, something that has yet to occur in the U.S. In this post I attempt to answer the following question: Is a return to long term economic growth possible? … Since long term economic growth requires an increasing supply of cheap energy… long term economic growth is unlikely.”

 

Boing Boing: ” A circle of army ants, each one following the ant in front, becomes locked into a circular mill. They will continue to circle each other until they all die.”

 

The Oil Drum: “A simple conclusion can be drawn from this analysis: combining all three options – using stocks [coal, oil, gas, nuclear], sharing across geographical areas and large size storage – doesn’t create more benefit than balancing with natural gas alone does, and without those stocks, it definitely doesn’t solve the problem of variability in outputs. The contrary is true: a combination adds cost to the system, and creates complexity. At a certain point, because all those extra technologies use fossil fuels in their production, installation and maintenance, their use might not even reduce overall carbon emissions. Even when combining all of it, it  doesn’t mean that we need less gas power plants, it simply pushes utilization of those plants down, because they still have to be kept available for those unpredictable but absolutely unavoidable events when everything else fails to deliver.”

 

Harper’s Magazine: “Nietzsche’s mature view is thus that community cannot exist without being gathered and preserved by a Gesamtkunstwerk. There cannot be genuine community without (in the broadest possible sense of the term) a ‘church.’ And community is important, for only if there exists a community to which we feel we are, in our own way, as we say, ‘making a contribution’ can we live meaningful, flourishing lives. As to the content of a communal religion–as to what would play the exemplary role played in Christianity by its saints and martyrs–he has no view. That content may vary widely depending on the cultural tradition of the community concerned. Nietzsche’s only stipulation is that the sacred figures in any healthy religion must be, like the Greek gods, glorifications of human potential rather than, like the Christian gods, anti-human ideals. The new religious festival will celebrate rather than condemn sexuality, will be a festival of life rather than death”

 

Global Guerillas: “Here’s some interesting analysis from the IMF regarding global unemployment, which may lead (in their words) to a social explosion. The Great Recession has left gaping wounds. High and long-lasting unemployment represents a risk to the stability of existing democracies. …

“One potential future is that the social pressures of D2 will shred what’s left of the social contract in the Western democracies. That would mean that the only way out (for those of us unwilling to be passive) is to build something new.  Something that mitigates our connection to this global system.   My best attempt at a solution to this conundrum is the resilient community.  A resilient community that can protect and sustain us.  A community that can provide prosperity and a future worth living in.  A community that can out compete successfully at a global level while protecting its members from the viciousness of an unconstrained invisible hand.”

 

Vancouver Sun: “Documents reveal federal researchers, whose work is financed by taxpayers, need approval from Ottawa before speaking with media. … The Harper government has tightened the muzzle on federal scientists, going so far as to control when and what they can say about floods at the end of the last ice age”

 

The Oil Drum: “Few questions of history have been more enduring than how today’s complex societies evolved from the foraging bands of our ancestors. While this might seem of academic interest, it has important implications for anticipating our future. Our understanding of sustainability depends to a surprising degree on our understanding of the human past. My purposes today are to show that the conventional understandings of cultural evolution are untenable, as are assumptions about sustainability that follow from them, and to present a different approach to assessing our future.”

 

Post Carbon Institute: “A good guess would be that 95+ percent of the people living to earth today do not understand that the oil age has started drawing to a close and that massive change stemming there from are already underway. …

“The second phase of our great transition will come a few years later when it has become obvious to all that the world’s oil supply has started to decline. When this day comes, the political debates should shift to a search for solutions to the reality of surviving without fossil fuels. Concerns about ‘burdensome’ taxes, social issues, creating good jobs, and setting the country to growing again will melt in the face of concerns about national survival and social stability.

“For now however, we are mired in a period when politicians debate and run for office seemingly without an appreciation of serious underlying issues such as resource depletion, overpopulation, and global warming. For now the political debate is shaped in terms of the short vs. long run benefits for the voters – with the short-run beating concerns for future generations hands down. Any action that is perceived to hurt the pocket books of one’s current constituents such as increasing the cost of energy or raising taxes is considered a non-starter.”

 

The Globe and Mail: “Chinese steel mills and mobile phone factories are being idled and thousands of homes in one area are doing without electricity as local governments order power cuts to meet energy-saving targets set by Beijing.”

 

Oil Drum: “Transportation: Peak Oil is fundamentally a liquid fuels crisis. We use 70% of the oil for transportation. Over 97% of all transportation depends on oil. Full substitutes for oil in this area are unlikely (I’d go so far as to say impossible). Biofuels are extremely problematic: their net energy is low, their production rates are also low, their environmental costs in soil fertility are too great. Crop based biofuels compete directly with food, while cellulosic technologies risk ‘strip mining the topsoil’ at the production rates needed to offset the loss of oil. Electricity will be able to substitute in some applications such as trains, streetcars and perhaps battery powered personal vehicles, though at significant cost in terms of both flexibility and economics. There is no realistic substitute for jet fuel.”