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| Selected
Peak Oil News From The Web. (Updated March 18th,
2006) |
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Peak
Oil Links Directory
(Currently There Are 334 Links
In This Directory)
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Peak
Oil (84)
Blogs,
Foreign,
Survivalist,
News,
More....
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Alternative
Power (92)
Solar,
Wind,
Biomass,
Biodiesel,
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New
Urbanism, Sustainability (74)
Design,
Environment,
Earthships,
Homesteading,
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Transporation
(45)
Hydrogen,
Carfree,
Alternative,
Hybrid,
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Food
& Human Needs (39)
Canning
& Preserving, Solar
Cooking, Hemp,
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We
Are Back!!!
(Dusko
Jocic July 25th, 2006)
I haven't written anything
new for a few months as I have been abroad visiting
countries for their peak oil problems and trying
to capture images of this. Some of the articles
below discuss these issues. So enjoy the new content
and don't worry about the dates too much! I needed
a way to sort it and here it is.
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Global
Dimming And Peak Oil
Dusko
Jocic (July
20th, 2006)
Look
out boys and girls it's official. If we start going
into an energy tailspin global warming is about to go
through the roof. It all started a few years ago when
Isreals' Minister Of Agriculture measured the amount
of sunlight hitting isreal. He was startled to learn
that there was a 10% reduction in sunlight hitting the
area.
Other scientists had also reached the conclusion that
there was a 16% drop in Europe, 30% in some regions
of Russia, 10% lost over North America and a drop everywhere
else. And the cause being pollution from the burning
fossil fuels. Global Warming is much worst then we thought
and is being masked by our carbon emissions.
More...
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Mummies
Make Us Move
Dusko
Jocic (July
10th, 2006)
According to Wikipedia.org : Thermal
depolymerization (TDP) is a process for the reduction of complex
organic materials (usually waste products of various sorts,
often known as biomass) into light crude oil. It is a proven
technique of turning organic matter of all kinds into light
sweet crude, natural gas, distilled water and a mix of minerals.
If a 165 pound man was inserted into one end of the machine
on the other end would come out approximately 40-45 litres
of oil, a few pounds of natural gas, 120 pounds of distilled
water and a few more pounds of minerals.More...
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Syriania
Review (Spoiler Alert)
Dusko
Jocic (July
1st, 2006)
Syriana was the most anticipated film
for peakniks last year. But it's not as interesting
as I had hoped.
It barely skims the surface of Peak Oil. It avoids dealing
with any real solutions to big oil problems.
The trailer is also really misleading. "Imagine
30% of the US Population unable to heat their homes,
or gas
prices as high as $20 a gallon." But nowhere in
this film are these lines to be heard. I often found
myself
uninterested and bored and the person behind me was
snoring towards the end of the film. No Joke! The most
positive thing it does is bring the peak oil halfway
to the mainstream. But it still has a ways to go.
More...
Nikola
Tesla, The Enabler Of Suburbia
Dusko
Jocic (June
20th, 2006)
Nicola Tesla was a Serbian inventor
and a key man responsible for todays suburban way of
life. He created our system of AC Power generation and
much of todays power grid relys on his inventions' ability
to transfer power over great distances. This invention
is no less then the Brushless Polyphase Alternating
Current Engine. Early industrial cities were limited
in size because direct current power needed to be generated
2 miles or less from a factory or home. But Teslas'
invention allowed energy to flow anywhere and everywhere.
The suburbia of today would probably have little or
no electricity without Tesla. Why would you drive a
car to a place that doesn't have electricity? You probably
wouldn't and instead you would stay in walkable urban
centers or dense cities with DC power plants. Tesla
allowed light rail to go from the city to suburbia.
Before him, electric streetcars were inefficient and
dangerous. The Brooklyn Dodgers were named after people
dodging electrical discharges caused by DC powered trollies.
Early street cars were also limited in the distance
they could travel. More...
Cannibal
Forks, Wilson, Castaway Island & Peak Oil
Dusko
Jocic (June
10th, 2006)
Coming back from my working
trip to Fiji in May of 2006 has changed my view of these
formerly cannibal islands.
The chief product of this tiny island nation is most
certainly tourism. Tourism that will vanish as fleets
of
Jumbo Jets become incapable of deploying hoards of backpackers
and honeymooners onto the islands. I had the
fortune of photographing a wedding on Malolo Island.
It was a place where everything is shipped in. I felt
like
I was in Florida with all the ammenities I have come
to expect in a first world nation. All this from an
island
barely bigger then a cul de sac. And the lifeblood of
it all is cheap fuel. The only exception being the main
mode of transportation. People travel the islands by
boat, helicopter and sea plane instead of automobile.
More...
Hallucinated
Wealth And The Future!
Dusko
Jocic (May
20th, 2006)
What exactly does the word
WEALTH mean? For many wealth means how nice, new and
up to date their lifestyle and
personal possessions are. How new is your car? How expensive?
Which brand? You are judged based on these things
and not the wealth of knowledge or wisdom you might
have in your mind or heart. What happens when we cease
using
cars when they become impossible to make and unaffordable
to drive? Will we value clothing more? What happens
when the cheap shipments of clothing stop coming in
from China. What then? Will you be judged on your vacation
when air fuel becomes too expensive for most to travel
abroad? These are the questions modern Western Societies
will have to answer in ten years time.
More...
Energy
And The Childhoods' of The 1980s
Dusko
Jocic (May
10th, 2006)
"The planet of Prysmos
had enjoyed a technological age for several thousand
years, untill the realignment
of the three suns marked the end of the age of science
and technology and began the age of magic. Prysmos had
now entered a kind of medieval age where all forms of
technology were now useless and mankind on Prysmos had
to resort to a more primitive and simple way of living."
This is the storyline of an animated childrens' show
in the 80s, called Knights of the Magical Light. The
show begins with a glimpse into a society where all
technology stops and powerdown is immediate and hard.
The introductory credits show cars stopping, buildings
and computers losing power and society coming appart.
More...
Serbias'
Peak Oil Dress Rehearsal
Dusko
Jocic (May
1st, 2006)
When the wars in the former
Yugoslavia broke out, the once mighty Yugoslav Republic
of Serbia was under
a terrible oil embargo and sanctions. When I was seventeen
I visited that country, my country of origin and
saw the future of the world. I didn't know it at the
time, but the fate of the entire industrial world was
in
front of me. James Kunstler believes that cities will
shrink in size and the countryside of the United States
would be repopulated when the peak arrives. This is
exactly what happened in Serbia during the oil shortages
of the nineties. People migrated back to small villages
and grew their own food to survive. Serbia has very
rich soil due to the annual flooding of the Danube river.
This body of water provides nutrients to the
countryside when it floods. More...
Peak
Oil And The Land Down Under
Dusko
Jocic (April
20th, 2006)
One would think that on a continent
of only twenty-three million people peak energy/oil
wouldn't be that great of a problem. That's what I thought
before I went there. Instead, Australia is a continent
with plentiful natural resources that are now peaking
and going into depletion. And the continent lacks water,
good farm land and has suburban sprawl that equals that
of Los Angeles. More...
Ontario
And Peak Oil
Dusko
Jocic (April
10th, 2006)
I
write this article from a dingy basement in Toronto,
Canada. It's the largest city in this country but I
wonder about how long I'll be living here. My house
is a mid-fifties suburb about 15 kilometers from downtown.
It's not bad considering the subway is nearby and it'll
saved from the fate of having to commute to work with
a car. All I need to do is find employment along the
subway line and I'll be alright. Everything depends
on how quickly peak oil extraction is reached and what
the rates of decline are. If it declines 10% annually
then we are all in trouble but a 2-5% decline will be
relatively managable. More...
A
Red Crude Rising
Ronald Lairchild (March 18th, 2006)
In 1986 Tom Clancy and Larry Bond wrote a war-thriller
called Red Storm Rising. Not one of Clancy’s usual
“sniper-supermodel” pieces, Red Storm Rising
envisioned what would happen if the now defunct USSR
went to war with NATO. The novel has gained a fair amount
of attention from military theorists and practitioners
across the world: “Red Storm Rising is basic literature
at many military academies inside and outside the United
States, as are several other books by Tom Clancy.
MORE...
Taurus
Major And Peak Oil!
Dusko Jocic (February
27th, 2006)
A
couple of weeks ago I was surfing the web looking for
something new about peak oil conspiracies and I happened
to come accross the page, arkadysimkin.pl. The site
is about a Russian geologist that looks for oil in extremely
remote parts of Russia with his team of scientists and
specialists. They uncovered omething incredible in the
ice and find a gigantic creature that is at least 20
times larger than the Wooley Mamoth. MORE..
Shooting
The Sun And The Steel Box
Ronald Lairchild (February
11th, 2006)
A
man named James Burke once made a show called Connections
(produced by the BBC). Connections was dedicated to
technology and the perils of relying too heavily on
technology and the pitfalls we as a race create for
ourselves when we complicate our lives by putting technology
ahead of self reliance. The story of technology is of
course a story of an ever expanding new things, and
of course many of these new things replace old things,
which perhaps we had better kept on hand just in case.
MORE...
Peak
Oil A Bible Prophecy?
Dusko Jocic (January
31, 2006)
I'm
sure many of you are already cringing at the sight of
this articles title but most biblical scholars don't
even make the connection that peak oil can bring about
the end of days. according to the Book Of Revelation
in the new testament, Armageddon is supposed to happen
in the Middle East. Sounds like a fairly logical place
if that's where all the oil is and nations are starving
for energy. The final battle is supposed to begin when
Iran and its northern allie, (most scholars say Russia)
attack the nation of Israel. They are repelled by the
revived Roman Empire, which is most likely a European
& North American coalition. MORE...
Lets
Roll, 911 & Peak Oil
Dusko Jocic (January
17, 2006)
What if 911 was a conspiracy
and was staged for a greater purpose? That's exactly
what the website and film LetsRoll911.org explains with
great enthusiasm and patriotism. There is evidence that
the planes that slammed into the World Trade Center
had missiles and explosives on their under-carriages
to help bring down the twin towers. As well, people
interviewed in the film say that there were separate
explosions all over the buildings, during and after
the planes slammed into them. MORE...
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The 200 Year Housing Bubble
Dusko Jocic (January
04, 2006)
A
few weeks ago I went to a workshop for potential real
estate buyers in Toronto. This seminar was for for a
system called Noble Wealth. It was another one of those
infomercial style pitches where they try to sell you
insider information that is usually common sense. It
was about how to become a landlord and make money through
renting your property and generating passive income.
The seminar panel talked about the housing bubble and
how we would all be spared from it and flipping houses
was here to stay. MORE...
The
Island of Voz
Ronald Lairchild (December
26th, 2005)
In
the little known country of Kazakhstan, on the border
of Uzbekistan, is something formerly known as the Aral
Sea. A Now a sea in name only, its name is synonymous
with pictures of rotting landlocked fishing trawlers
rusting silently in what appears to be a desert. Now
at 40% of its original size and 20% of it’s original
volume, it Aral is a shadow of its former self and almost
completely barren. This sort of drastic change is the
legacy of the industrial might of a now defunct superpower.
MORE...
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Cowschwitz
And The Mcfarmer
Dusko
Jocic (December 17th)
Last year I drove through the
deserts of the Southwestern United States. Fresh fruits
and vegetables grew all around me using year round sun,
automated irrigation and oil based fertilizers. With
this mode of production, farming becomes about logistics
and scale. It is hard to imagine what life will be like
when shipping this produce becomes costly and inefficient.
MORE...
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Peakniks, Doomers, and Wall Street’s Itchy Trigger
Finger
Ronald Lairchild (December
7th, 2005)
For
years the term “Peak Oil” was a sort of
economic bogeyman, used by high school teachers economics
teachers to frighten their students into recycling every
week. From time to time people would use it to inspire
movies from Road Warrior to Syriana video games like
Fallout. When Hubbert presented his theory the E.R.O.E.I.
or “Energy Returned On Energy Invested”
was something like 50 barrels reapeded out of the ground
to every barrel used. MORE...
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Women
Don't Belong In The Post-Petro Workplace!
Dusko Jocic (November
30th, 2005)
Although women have come a long way in our society
with regards to equality in the workforce, there will
never be true equality. As long as the real objects
of value in our society are primarily built by males
women will always be dependent on man. Cheap energy
has enabled womens' liberation to thrive and women to
have equal income and say in the family but that age
of cheap and abundent fossil fuel is ending and so too
is the age of equality.MORE...
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My Pet Bunker
Ronald Lairchild (November
23rd, 2005)
The only people who use the word "bunker" with
any frequency are people in the military, World War
One buffs, and gamers. Most people remember a time where
bunkers were common, sometime before flower children
and the war on drugs. Known by names such as "bomb shelters"
or "blast shelters", no matter what you call them they
became a lot more common in North American houses with
the Cuban missile crisis. MORE... |
As Oil Peaks, Welcome Back To Sesame Street.
Dusko
Jocic (November 16th,
2005)
As a kid I didn't know the
situation facing the characters on Sesame Street. I didn't
realise that the only people in inner cities in the seventies
and eighties were those too poor to get out. That would explain
why Oscar the Grouch lived in a trash can and why an armless
Snufalufagus had a hard time getting a traditional office
job in the burbs. So why does Sesame Street continue to be
such a popular program for youngsters?
MORE...
Iraq,
Iran, And Uncle Sam..
Ronald
Lairchild(November
9th, 2005)
Over
the past fifty years few countries have seen as much mutual
animosity as Iran and The United States of America. People
in Iran have been having political dealings with each other
since the late 1800s, but in the early 2000s rarely a month
goes by without tension either increasing or decreasing between
the two countries. The first of many major “sore spots”
came when Iran felt the effects of something called Operation
Ajax...
MORE...
Dam
Or Damn The Nile?
Dusko
Jocic (November
1st, 2005)
I
have recently returned from my amazing travels down the River
Nile in Egypt and what I have seen has left me absolutely
breathless. I am not refering to the palaces and temples built
by the Egyptians during the early, middle and late kingdoms
of Ancient Egypt. The structure in question is the Aswan High
Dam. Built in joint co-operation between Egypt and the Former
USSR, the dam was to provide power for Egypt And Sudan as
they began to become fully developed.....
MORE...
Who
Killed Diesel?
Ronald Lairchild (october
25th, 2005)
When
I grew up the only people who used Diesel were those who had
a farm or those who owned a Volkswagen. Everyone knew at that
time that Diesel was about two thirds the price of Regular
Gasoline and it was also well known that a quarter tank of
Diesel could get you to the city and back. It was true then
that diesel-powered cars weren’t as fast...
MORE...
Jobs,
Renewable Energy and The Economy.
Dusko Jocic (october
18th, 2005)
It
is likely that renewable energy will drive our economy in
the post oil future. Commercial and residential properties
will run off of wind and solar energy but this will impact
overall employment negatively. Low payed utility workers that
do everything from fix hydro lines to shovel coal into power
plants will be unemployed. MORE...
Distant
Rumbles. Ronald
Lairchild
(october 11th, 2005)
It wasn’t too long ago that the engines
of CN Rail visited my hometown. I was born in the mid-seventies,
and I can clearly remember running to the fence at the back
of the schoolyard to watch the vast Diesel Engines rumble
by, looking to see what had happened to the pennies my friends
had placed on the tracks. When I walked home I always had
to watch to see if the train was coming, and sure enough the
tracks by my home had huge trains go by at odd hours, so it
paid to be aware. MORE.. |
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