THE END IS NIGH!!!!
Kenneth Deffeyes reckons that we may well have hit Peak Oil, that point where our industrial society is post-mid-arc in its use of available resources, and I get worried. I thought it was about ten years away, and that was me being pessimistic. Plenty of time to get things sorted... but not anymore. So I think I should really get some info and then work out what to do (which usually just involves me ranting down the pub).
I head down to the bookshop, and find that Peak Oil Armageddon literature is a major growth industry. I wander out with a copy of James Howard Kunstler's The Long Emergency: Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-first Century. It's got just the right kind of cover - bright red, picture of the globe deliquescing off the page - that reminds me of all those Nuclear Apocalypse self-help guides you used to get in the 1980's.
I'm currently halfway through, but I can't help but notice that in the last ten days since Duffeye's piece appeared, things seem to be going really quite fast. We've got Bush's State of the Union pledging to end the US's addiction to oil, which is worrying just for the fact that this is the representative of a huge oil cartel talking. And I think it's maybe just an aside, a warning.
But then we get more. "The dependence upon oil is a national security problem and an economic security problem," Bush said publicly during a two day trip to see how the US alternative energy industry was faring. This is worrying, especially if you're outside the US.
The solutions are even more worrying. Bush thinks that active solar power - the type that turns sunlight into electricty - should be competitive (presumably to oil) by 2015. If it can be done, and having read Kunstler's opinion on solar electricity I'm not sure it can, that's all well and good. But exactly how are these solar panels going to be deployed? How big a battery would you need to power, say, street lighting at night? What happens when you have a month of overcast sky? Are we all going to have solar panels on our houses for home use, and if so, will this not cause millions of redundancies as the electricy comapnies close down?
Bush seems to think that technology will answer the crisis. As a case in point, nuclear electricity was supposed to bring in an era of cheap electricity in the 1950's. And it did. The only problem was that nobody had a freakin' clue what to do with the radioactive waste it produced. And half a century later we still don't. And that's why solar energy is being touted rather than nuclear - because technology doesn't solve political problems, and Peak Oil Armageddon will be almost completely a political problem.
Bush, and the oil companies he represents, know that our petroleum driven culture is about to go tits-up this century. "I think we're in an important moment in history," Bush said. "We have a chance to transform the way we power our economy and the way we lead our lives."
It's interesting how this is currenly being presented to the public as a 'choice'.
Kenneth Deffeyes reckons that we may well have hit Peak Oil, that point where our industrial society is post-mid-arc in its use of available resources, and I get worried. I thought it was about ten years away, and that was me being pessimistic. Plenty of time to get things sorted... but not anymore. So I think I should really get some info and then work out what to do (which usually just involves me ranting down the pub).
I head down to the bookshop, and find that Peak Oil Armageddon literature is a major growth industry. I wander out with a copy of James Howard Kunstler's The Long Emergency: Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-first Century. It's got just the right kind of cover - bright red, picture of the globe deliquescing off the page - that reminds me of all those Nuclear Apocalypse self-help guides you used to get in the 1980's.
I'm currently halfway through, but I can't help but notice that in the last ten days since Duffeye's piece appeared, things seem to be going really quite fast. We've got Bush's State of the Union pledging to end the US's addiction to oil, which is worrying just for the fact that this is the representative of a huge oil cartel talking. And I think it's maybe just an aside, a warning.
But then we get more. "The dependence upon oil is a national security problem and an economic security problem," Bush said publicly during a two day trip to see how the US alternative energy industry was faring. This is worrying, especially if you're outside the US.
The solutions are even more worrying. Bush thinks that active solar power - the type that turns sunlight into electricty - should be competitive (presumably to oil) by 2015. If it can be done, and having read Kunstler's opinion on solar electricity I'm not sure it can, that's all well and good. But exactly how are these solar panels going to be deployed? How big a battery would you need to power, say, street lighting at night? What happens when you have a month of overcast sky? Are we all going to have solar panels on our houses for home use, and if so, will this not cause millions of redundancies as the electricy comapnies close down?
Bush seems to think that technology will answer the crisis. As a case in point, nuclear electricity was supposed to bring in an era of cheap electricity in the 1950's. And it did. The only problem was that nobody had a freakin' clue what to do with the radioactive waste it produced. And half a century later we still don't. And that's why solar energy is being touted rather than nuclear - because technology doesn't solve political problems, and Peak Oil Armageddon will be almost completely a political problem.
Bush, and the oil companies he represents, know that our petroleum driven culture is about to go tits-up this century. "I think we're in an important moment in history," Bush said. "We have a chance to transform the way we power our economy and the way we lead our lives."
It's interesting how this is currenly being presented to the public as a 'choice'.
posted by deezelboy at 8:18 AM
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