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...

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...

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 something incredible in the ice and find a gigantic creature that is at least 20 times larger than the Wooley Mamoth. The glaciers on an incredibly remote island had melted and revealed the beast under the ice. The creature is partially revealed and there is more under the ice. 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 10, 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. Many eye-witnesses reported that the planes had blue logos on their front sections and no windows and their undercarriages were heavily modified. If these weren't passenger flights what were they? MORE...

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...

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...

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 to pump the precious resource from the ground. MORE...

Women Don't Belong In The Post-Petro Workplace!
Dusko Jocic (November 30th, 2005)
lthough 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...

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..