Technology

Peak exploration: The Apollo program and the high water mark of Western civilization

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As we lament the launching of the last U.S. space shuttle mission, we should pause for a moment and reflect on what it really means. Ironically, the first moon landing happened one year before America reached its domestic peak in oil production, which likely better explains more than any other single factor why the space program failed to advance after Apollo program wrapped up.

Book review: “Against the Machine: Hidden Luddite Tradition in Literature, Art, and Individual Lives”

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We are a stressed out, frustrated, and angry people that has become totally dependent on our technology for our everyday lives. People routinely bang on their computers in a way reminiscent of the first Luddites who hammered at the weaving frames of the smoke-belching factories of Leeds, Manchester, and Sheffield. Nicols Fox in her book, Against the Machine provides an astute and highly fascinating account of how we have come to where we are today and what we sacrificed as a result.

How to make systems thinking sexy

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(Article based on the keynote speech at the Buckminster Fuller Challenge awards in New York on 8 June.)

We will not transition successfully to a restorative economy until systems thinking becomes as natural, for millions of people, as riding a bike. That’s a big ask. How do we get from here, to there? …

Outside the business-as-usual tent, gradualism is on the retreat. A new kind of economy – a restorative economy – is emerging in a million grassroots projects all over the world. The better-known examples have names like Post-Carbon Cities, or Transition Towns. But examples also include dam removers, seed bankers, and iPhone doctors.

A restorative economy is emerging wherever people are growing food in cities, or turning school backyards into edible gardens. The movement includes people who are restoring ecosystems and watersheds; their number includes dam removers, wetland restorers, and rainwater rescuers. Many people in this movement are recycling buildings in downtowns and suburbs, favelas and slums.

The US crude production peak is not symmetrical

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People that worry about the peaking of global oil supplies often use symmetrical curves as simple models for how production will peak and then decline, with logistics and Gaussians being popular choices. This goes back to M. King Hubbert (and I’ve done some of this myself). The United States is the poster child for this kind of analysis, since this region was the first to be developed at scale and production peaked in 1970. However, it seems increasingly clear that the US production curve is far from symmetrical (perhaps driven by higher prices since the 1970s, and especially in the 2000s). Using data from the EIA for production and reserves, we can see that the decline side is slower than the growth side for both.

ODAC Newsletter – May 27

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There was a step forward this week for recognition of peak oil in the UK political agenda. Energy Secretary Chris Huhne has agreed that the Department for Energy and Climate Change and ITPOES (UK Industry Taskforce on Peak Oil and Energy Security) should work more closely together on peak-oil threat assessment and contingency planning.

Review: A User’s Guide to the Crisis of Civilization by Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed

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User’s Guide to the Crisis of Civilization shows how our major crises share the same root causes and thus can be solved only by taking into account their complex interactions. Ahmed acknowledges that in this age of specialization it’s understandable for issues like climate change and oil depletion to be studied and discussed separately—indeed, he observes that this mode of inquiry into the causes of specific phenomena has enabled many of our greatest scientific advances. But it’s also, he argues, beginning to seem like an increasingly antiquated method, preventing experts from seeing the whole picture and the public from receiving consistent information.

The tyranny of the temporary

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Generals are particularly famous for planning for the last war rather than the next one, but it’s a common failing; most of today’s industrial civilization, for example, is busily planning its future on the basis of the energy supplies it had available in the recent past, rather than those much sparser supplies it will have to make do with in the recent future. Outside the myopic conviction that temporary conditions will last forever, there are plenty of options that can make the Long Descent ahead of us less grueling than it will otherwise be.

ODAC Newsletter – May 13

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Oil demand appears to finally be responding to high oil prices, most significantly in the US where petrol prices have hit $4/gallon. The IEA cut its 2011 demand forecast by 190,000 barrels/day on news of increased US stockpiles and reduced consumption, and prices dropped back from recent highs to around $110/barrel for Brent…