Banff Transition

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.”

 

The Oil Drum: Vaclav Smil, professor of Environment and Environmental Geography at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, has written a new book called Energy Myths and Realities. In the book, he looks at a number of things he considers myths:

1. The future belongs to electric cars
2. Nuclear electricity will be too cheap too meter
3. Soft-energy illusions (local generation, etc.)
4. Running out: Peak oil and its meaning
5. Sequestration of carbon dioxide
6. Liquid fuels from plants
7. Electricity from wind
8. The pace of energy transitions

 

Post Carbon Institute: This article explores the coming energy crunch in more detail by looking at existing government planning and awareness, and the implications of what international recognition of Peak Oil as early as 2012 might mean. The hard news is that there is no ‘Plan B.’  The future is likely to be more chaotic than you probably think. Peak Oil is being examined closely and taken seriously by military analysts, but not civilian authorities.  The few plans that do exist on the civilian side are decades old.

 

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.”

 

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.”

 

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.”

 

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.”