Julian Darley

It is hard to know where to begin regarding Ambrose Evans-Pritchard’s article entitled “Energy crisis is postponed as new gas rescues the world.” But since the speculative world he invokes has more to with Alice In Wonderland than the hard reality of engineering and science, let us begin – at the end.

In this Sustainable Business Alliance speaker series, Julian Darley talks with Bay Area business owners about the impact Peak Oil is having on their business and community.

29 years after the movie “The China Syndrome,” America has triggered a global financial meltdown, from which China thought for a while that it might be immune. Not so. What did not happen in the film, is happening to the real-life economy of China. Factories are closing at astonishing rates, including in the Pearl River Delta – “the factory floor of the world,” and whole areas of business, such as scrap metal, are contracting or collapsing.

If President-elect Obama’s team does not get a hefty dose of energy reality, they are likely to make very poor strategic decisions. For instance, in the light of peak oil, is bailing out the dinosaur US auto makers the right thing to do?

The power of concentrated money – capital as we usually call it – is clearly enormous. Some things have to be done with collected resources if you want civilisation to continue, especially things to do with transport. But then there is the fact that if someone is doing it (using concentrated resources) and you are not, you will most likely be pushed out of the game.

There are at least two invisible things that tend to be ferociously difficult to understand. One is relations among humans and the other is energy. Especially when the former want more of the latter. And for some reason, understandable perhaps but also unfortunate, we are mostly loathe to try to comprehend where our energy comes from. [Excepts]