Banff Transition

There must be some coal left at Bankhead. Maybe not enough to run a railroad, but enough to keep a small town warm. We need a Banff School of Mines.

 

The Archdruid Report: “The point that has to be grasped just now, it seems to me, is that this is what peak oil looks like. Get past the fantasies of sudden collapse on the one hand, and the fantasies of limitless progress on the other, and what you get is what we’re getting—a long ragged slope of rising energy prices, economic contraction, and political failure, punctuated with a crisis here, a local or regional catastrophe there, a war somewhere else—all against a backdrop of disintegrating infrastructure, declining living standards, decreasing access to health care and similar services, and the like,”

 

The Archdruid Report: “The role of ecosystem limits in sustainability is tolerably well understood. Less often grasped, because of its unwelcome implications, is the second category of limits that has to be addressed, which might best be called complexity limits. … This is why, for example, I’ve suggested here that the internet is not going to make it very far into the post-abundance future. To keep the internet up and running takes a vastly complex technological structure, ranging from gigawatts of electricity from centralized power plants, through silicon chip factories and their supporting industries and supply chains, to universities that can train people in the wide range of exotic specialties that keep the net functioning.”

 

Low-tech Magazine: “One way to solve the large energy losses of pedal power generators is not to produce electricity at all but power devices mechanically, whenever possible.”

 

Post Carbon Institute: “The farmers’ market saves energy by carving it out of the processing, packaging, and retail segments of the food chain, which are much larger than the transportation segment. From this perspective, the backyard garden offers all of the advantages of a farmers’ market, and then some.”

 

Post Carbon Institute: Excerpt from Richard Heinberg’s new book The End of Growth, which is set for publication by New Society Publishers in July 2011.

“There are seldom-acknowledged factors external to financial and monetary systems that are effectively choking off efforts to restart growth. These factors, whose impacts are worsening over time, were briefly alluded to in the Introduction; here we will unpack them in more detail, discussing limits to oil and other energy sources, as well as to food, water, and minerals. We will also explore the increasing cost of industrial accidents and environmental disasters—and why, in the wide wake of global climate change, those costs are likely to escalate to the point that disaster avoidance and recovery will constitute a major portion of future government and private spending.”

 

ClubOrlov: “A lot of people just don’t have the right character to deal with collapse. They’ll be running around trying to fix things. That’s the opposite of what they should be doing.”

 

The Oil Drum: “[I]t appears that for the fifth year in a row the peak production year of 2005–in which the world produced oil at an average, annual rate of 73.718 mbpd–will once again not be exceeded. This is truly an astonishing result given that a new pricing era for oil began in 2004 as oil rose above 40.00 dollars a barrel. For over five years national oil companies and publicly traded oil companies have been free to sell oil into an ever-rising price environment. But no increase in global crude oil production has been forthcoming. …

“Another region in Non-OPEC that has disappointed is Canada. While Canadian oil production soared coming into the last decade, its production halted starting in 2006 and since then has oscillated around 2.6 mbpd. There is much hope for future increases from Canada and there is even a kind of mini-myth taking place in the US right now that Canada will be a strong source of future supply to the US. However, what has happened in Canada the past decade is that cheap conventional barrels of oil have been replaced with expensive tar sands barrels of oil. The result? Running in place in terms of supply, but at a much higher cost structure.”

 

Post Carbon Institute: Interview with Chris Martenson. “The key is resilience, self-dependency and versatility.”