Materials on energy

For a starting point, look at this metadirectory.

This Australian site has a fine collection of free multimedia presentations.

After Katrina

In one of her Newsweek columns, Anna Quindlen has some choice remarks:

there has been no powerful national leadership from either party on this front in recent memory. Political officials have bowed to the public's thirst for more, more, more.it is going to become harder and harder to overcome the effects of blind overgrowth even for those of means. Get ready for the $100 tank of gas, and an Armageddon of our own making.We have been crummy stewards of the Earth, with a sense of knee-jerk entitlement that tells us there is always more where this came from. There isn't.

A Peak Oil blogger from the southern States, Aaron, wrote entries titled, katrina: will we simply react? and we must plan for ourselves. I ask: what really should be the lessons of Hurricane Katrina? It's not merely that we ought be self-sufficent in the short-term.

We need look at the bigger picture. Historical circumstances, including government actions and inactions, led to the vulnerability of the people of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. Some factors are: poverty, complacency, lack of will, expedience, inattention to the consequences on the natural environment (with the erosion of the marsh lands) and inadequate standards in the design and construction of the floodwall foundations.

Similar circumstances make us vulnerable to oil shortages. But we can expect those shortages to be increasing, permanent and global. Who is going to bail us out then?

So the survivalists may have it right, not only for their personal survival but as an ethical statement. The caching of industrial goods won't cut it. Rather, long-term survival for our species may require real local self-sufficiency. But what place is still natural and temperate enough (the South?) to support human survival, and who is courageous enough to shun outside dependencies and prepare for the worst?

How high?

The film Syriana opens in December. The trailer begins:

Imagine gas at $20 a gallon.

Mere fiction?

Are higher oil prices good for you?

Robert Samuelson on MSNBC/Newsweek stated a month ago:

What this country needs is $4-a-gallon gasoline or, maybe, $5. We don't need it today, but we do need it over the next seven to 10 years via a steadily rising oil tax.

Would that market prices (even without the gas tax) were so low a year from now.

Mr. Samuelson cites our negligence of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) as emblematic of the problem:

The SPR languished. In 1992, it had oil equal to 83 days of imports; by 2000, that was only 52 days.

How farsighted we were back then compared to now, right?

The signs abound

MSNBC often has accessible articles related to Peak Oil. Here's one that describes the effects of high oil prices and another predicting higher prices yet.

Here, another blogger points to the scary data on the producer's side.

First things first

People are using more energy, including fossil fuels, than ever we have before, and soon we will run short. The implications are, or should be, frightening in the extreme.

In this web log, I will point out media pieces and web sites related to the subject of Peak Oil. A good starting point on the subject is this 'Wikipedia' article . Here's a re-listing of the recommended books from that article, but with Amazon links and prices or do the LibraryThing.

Also recommended is the June 2004 National Geographic cover article: The End of Cheap Oil . It concludes:

at least some of the ingenuity and toil that goes into getting oil needs to go toward limiting our thirst for it. "People should be doing something now to reduce oil dependence and not waiting for Mother Nature to slap them in the face"

The NG article was in some ways prescient in that, before Katrina, it described the hardships in finding and extracting oil offshore from New Orleans. But then, 'slap' is putting it mildly.