Click on the headline (link) for the full text.
Many more articles are available through the Energy Bulletin homepage
Endings aren’t always happy
Heading Out, The Oil Drum
This was the week that the History Channel aired the “Mega-disasters – Oil” program, which, in the best part of an hour could only briefly skirt all the different arguments that we discuss here, leading, in their case, to the conclusion that we are possibly heading towards the Mega-disaster of the title. But, given the speed of the story, and a little artistic license in dealing with a possible future, it left me wondering over a question. Tom Engelhardt in his Tom Dispatch of November 15, raises a similar question over the question of the current droughts that are developing about the country. In its simplest form the question is “What happens when it doesn’t get better?”
When the networks have put on the fictionalized reviews of the future oil shocks there has usually been a savior hanging around in the wings. In the first “Oil Shock”, for example, it was the Russians who sent a couple of tankers our way. Somehow I don’t think that scenario is now likely to play out, nor will it solve the problem. And while prayer is being tried in Georgia (as Tom notes) if we are now in a different climate mode than we were fifty years ago, we may, as I noted in an earlier post , be heading for droughts that will last for many decades. But it is the oil future that, despite the beginnings of MSM attention, is still likely to happen faster and more pervasively that I suspect most of us anticipate.
(19 November 2007)
The Freezing Point of Industrial Society
Kyle Schuant, The Oil Drum:ANZ
TOD editor Big Gav writes:
This is a guest post by Kyle Schuant. Kyle says he has read a lot of books and sometimes been asked to write essays about them, has met a wide variety of people in his life and concluded that no, “they” won’t just find an answer to our problems, and we really do have to worry. He is a good example of the fact that in the internet age anyone with a brain and too much time on their hands can find out just about anything and talk about it intelligently.
…This piece considers that industrialisation could only happen with cheap fuels, and by looking at the countries of the world, tries to figure out just how cheap fuel has to be before lots of people start using it ? before a country can industrialise with fossil fuels. The flipside to this is seeing how expensive fuel must be before it deindustrialises. This then gives us a clue to if and when will industrial society will end.
By an “industrial society” I mean one in which machines are powered not by human or animal motion and are a part of everyday life, and we design our homes and cities with machines in mind. A non-industrial society may have some machines, but it’s not designed around machines; a Kalahari Bushman can happily use a radio, but he does not live in an ?industrial society?, whereas his cousin who moves to Johannesburg and takes the bus to work does, even if she has no radio.
Going from a mostly-manual or animal economy to an industrial one, you can think of it as like the melting of ice into water at 0°C. When there’s enough heat (cheap energy) it melts (becomes industrial). But does the reverse apply? If you cool water down to 0°C, it’ll freeze. So if the cheap fuel becomes expensive, will we lose all that industry? Does industrial society have a freezing point, a point at which the heat (energy) has been drawn out of it, and so it changes from liquid (industrial) to solid (non-industrial)?
(14 November 2007)
Black Friday: Why this one is especially dark
Carolyn Baker, Truth to Power
I have no crystal ball, nor do I claim to have well-developed psychic powers, but I’d be willing to bet almost anything that next Thanksgiving season will be dramatically different from this one. A dark curtain of despair has descended, along with $100 oil, on Wall Street, and the amount of debt that the American working and middle classes are trying to juggle is, as Stan Goff so eloquently stated in his article on my site, “Middle Class Angst”, nothing less than “pre-volcanic.”
Cheap oil will allow us to travel “over the river and through the woods” to grandmother’s or someone else’s house, or we may prepare our food orgy at home using gas or electric ranges, savoring the turkey and trimmings made possible by low-cost hydrocarbon energy. While the feast will be more expensive than it was last year, its cost may pale by comparison with the price of next year’s gastronomical adventure-if indeed we can afford one. The after-dinner experience is likely to consist of television or movie viewing at home or another car trek to the local cine-plex for a new Thanksgiving Day release or two. A walk or bike ride requiring no use of hydrocarbon energy would be ideal, but it will take much more energy depletion than we are now experiencing to make that option viable for most Americans.
(21 November 2007)
