Transportation

The world-saving habit you’ll hate (and the great puzzle of the well-intentioned do-nothings)

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It’s easy to envision great and heroic personal sacrifice for a cause. Many of us think of think of ourselves as leaders in and members of a resilience building army. But the moment we have to step up and truly embody the mission, a lifetime of conditioning dulls our charge.

“The Plan” by Edwin Black

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What would happen if the unthinkable would happen? Author Edwin Black’s threatens not with a slow run-of-the-mill peak oil scenario, but rather an acute (perhaps terrorist-induced?) fuel crisis because of reduced global availability of oil by 5-10% for a period of least a month. Black then goes on to propose A Plan for how the U.S. could cope with such a disaster in his book “The Plan: How to rescue society when the oil stops – or the day before” (2008).

Entropy revisited

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One way of looking at our current set of predicaments is that we’ve been on a binge, consuming energy considerably faster than it can be captured and stored by Earth’s ecosystems. While fossil fuels once appeared limitless (and still do to deniers of peak oil), and though we’re literally bathed in energy (in the form of sunlight), the disappearance of the fossil-fuel storehouse accumulated over millions of years isn’t something that can be replaced with anything nearly as convenient as fossil fuels.

The peak oil crisis: revisiting the electric car

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If one thinks of the vast amount of infrastructure the developed world has to maintain – buildings, roads, water, sewage, trash disposal, public safety, power and communications lines – one soon gets the idea that even a relatively short range electric vehicle is going to be an awful lot better than an oxcart in preserving and rebuilding the facilities we currently rely on for food and shelter during the next 100 years or so.

Review: Why Your World Is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller by Jeff Rubin

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Jeff Rubin, former chief economist at Canadian investment bank CIBC World Markets, is not your typical economist. He gets peak oil…And now, in his bestselling book Why Your World Is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller, he argues that oil prices, temporarily dampened by the deepest post-war recession on record, will soon be vaulted to new highs as the economy begins to recover, which in turn will thrust the world into yet another recession right on the heels of this one.

Are cities sustainable in a post-peak oil world?

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-Depletion of Key Resources: Facts at Your Fingertips
-Cities, peak oil, and sustainability
-Reconsidering Cities
-Peter Newman: The Crash, Peak Oil and Resilient Cities
-Where do we go from here?