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Deffeyes on M.K. Hubbert (also, no “Stone Age”)
Kenneth S. Deffeyes, Beyond Oil (personal website)
Fifty years ago today, on the morning of March 8, 1956, M. King Hubbert gave a talk in San Antonio in which he predicted that US oil production would start to decline by the early 1970s. Up until minutes before Hubbert began, executives at the head office of Shell Oil (his employer) were on the phone asking him to cancel the talk. Hubbert’s presentation is widely regarded as the opening of the great debate about the finiteness of our oil supply.
…My conclusion: Hubbert was a great man, but with enough flaws to be really, really interesting.
…I do have an apology to make for a line in my February Current Events comment on this website. After stating that the world oil peak had already occurred on December 16, 2005, I reported that the Bush administration hoped to double the direct solar electric generation from the present one percent to two percent by the year 2025. My fingers got away from me and typed out: “By 2025, we’ll be back in the Stone Age.” I’m sorry that some readers thought that I actually meant that we would be wearing furs and hunting buffalo with flint spear points. It’s called “hyperbole.” Nevertheless, I have been looking into acquiring some property on the Arkansas novaculite belt. Great flint.
(8 March 2006)
Permaculture Activist magazine devoted to peak oil
Permaculture Activist (USA)
Contents:
- “Peak Oil and Permaculture” by Tim Winton
- “Ecological Collapse and Trauma Theory” by Lisa Rayner
- “Something Will Save Us” by Thom Hartman
- “Apocalypse, Not” by Toby Hemenway
- “The Curse of the Were-Rabbit as a Post-Apocalyptic Utopia” by Albert Bates
- “Designing Energy Descent Pathways” by Rob Hopkins
- “How Cuba Survived Peak Oil” by Megan Quinn
- “An Amtrak Peak-Oil Tour” by Jan Lundberg
- “Oil and Food: A Rising Security Challenge” by Danielle Murray
- “Relocalize Economic Life” by Doug Biggs
- “Biofuels: Peak Oil Silver Bulllet or Ecological and Humanitarian Disaster” by Alec Johnson
- “Cultivating Algae for Liquid Fuel Production” by Tom Riesing
(February 2006 issue)
Hardcopy only, I’m afraid. Some of the authors have online articles on Energy Bulletin and elsewhere.
Peak oil and municipal government – Huntington Beach Councilor Debbie Cook
David Room, Global Public Media
Huntington Beach City Councilor Debbie Cook speaks with David Room about how people can engage their municipal government on issues such as peak oil. She suggests concrete methods of establishing relationships and communicating with councilors that generally work better than haranguing the councilors at their monthly meeting. She also talks about her experiences in trying to raise awareness of peak oil with her colleagues and peers in municipal government.
(31 January 2006)
Stanford concludes lectures on “The End of Oil?”
School of Earth Sciences, Stanford University
This three-lecture series was convened in November 2005 with the presentation of two contrasting views about just how much oil is left. The series continued with presentations on February 21, 2006 on modeling techniques to predict further climate changes and the impact these are likely to have on the environment and on populations worldwide, and concluded on March 7, 2006 with a discussion about the transition to non-carbon forms of energy. Panelists in this final lecture in the series discussed a portfolio approach over the next 50-100 years, including sequestering greenhouse gases, improving energy efficiencies, promoting conservation practices, developing new forms of energy, creating ways to store energy, and developing innovative products that convey energy.
The following links provide the presentations that the speakers used during the talks. These are MS PowerPoint files…
(March 8, 2006)
Hundreds of people attended the three lectures. Combining peak oil, climate change and energy alternatives in the series was a wise choice. Speakers emphasized scientific and technical aspects; lifestyle and politics were barely mentioned. The information was good, but the only real surprise for me was Professor Jim Sweeney’s remark that oil-exporting countries encourage uncertainty about future oil prices, so as to make it difficult for investments in alternative energy sources. See original article for PowerPoint presentations from the first two sessions. More material, including videos of the last two sessions, is to be added to the website soon.
Related: Peak oil packs them in at Stanford (first session)
-BA
Lambs to the Slaughter (on the Exxon ad)
Carl Pope, Sierra Club
Irving, TX — A few weeks ago, ExxonMobil slapped President Bush in the face by declaring that, in spite of the President’s State of the Union call for energy independence, the world is now, and must continue to be, held hostage to OPEC and Middle Eastern oil. Now the company has picked up the cudgel of deep denial again. In its favorite spot on the op-ed page of the New York Times, it proclaimed, “Peak Oil? Contrary to the theory, oil production shows no sign of a peak.”
However, careful readers of the company’s annual analyses of energy trends, intended for its own key stakeholders, know that ExxonMobil doesn’t believe its own hype.
(7 March 2006)
