As I write this piece, we’re in the midst of a (biodiesel) road trip to Washington, D.C., towing behind us an unwieldy piece of history: a solar panel off the roof of the Carter White House. It’s decades old, though it still makes hot water just fine. In a sense, we’re traveling backward—which in another sense is what I think we’re going to have to do for a while in the U.S. climate movement.

-'Floating Chernobyls' to hit the high seas
-Hurricane Earl ... and Floating Nuclear Plants

President Obama's proposal to spend $50 billion on transportation infrastructure - including 4,000 miles of rail lines - couldn't be a better expenditure. ... Trains are one of the last public spaces left in our society and they also demand a different kind of behavior than we are accustomed in today's fast-paced, impersonal, high-security, privatized society. You can interact with other passengers you don't know, feel safe with them, and be with people who are largely respectful toward their fellow travelers.

A weekly roundup of peak oil news, including:
-Oil and the global economy
-Food
-The moratorium
-The Bundeswehr on peak oil

The April 2010 oil leak in the Mexican Gulf illustrates the risks being taken to extract oil from inaccessible fields, and in June a Lloyd’s 360° risk insight report said, “we have entered a period of deep uncertainty in how we will source energy for power, heat and mobility and how much we will pay for it.” The reason why such damaging extraction methods are pursued, and why Lloyd’s are telling us we face a “new energy paradigm” rather than normal market volatility, is that oil discoveries peaked 40 years ago, and oil supply is probably at its maximum, with decline soon to follow. This has substantial implications for transport, food, jobs, health, and health care.

The Witch of Hebron picks up a couple of months after World Made by Hand ended. Returning to the small upstate New York town of Union Grove, the new book further defines the post-apocalyptic setting, adds depth to characters who played only minor parts in the first story, ties up loose ends from the previous book and introduces some all new dilemmas. And it does all of this against the backdrop of a full-moon Halloween, lending a delicious sense of foreboding to the proceedings.

As the effects of Peak Oil make themselves felt, they will go far beyond gas prices.

The Canadian auto industry employs around a half million people directly and indirectly, almost all of which is in Ontario. This isn't just building and selling cars - there's a massive manufacturing empire needed to mine the ore, make the steel and machine the parts that extends well beyond Ford or Toyota. So what do we do with two of the nation's largest steel mills? ...

If cycling is going to catch on as a major means of transportation, somebody's going to have to start building new affordable and practical bikes. That's where steel comes in.

- "How to Boil a Frog" TV premiere in Canada next Wednesday!
- Peak oil and happy cows (interview with IEA's Fatih Birol)
- Voices of the Transition

- Kurt Cobb: Fossil Fuels vs. The Public Interest
- Is Fracking Even Worse Than Drilling?
- Canada tar sands industry ignoring toxic river pollution

As part of its focus on action in the present--the moment at which oil is peaking--as a time of opportunity for decisive action of historical consequences, the Transition Movement embraces the act of telling stories; stories are a crucial tool for this monumental change--as important, perhaps, as our new-found ability to darn socks and grow Kale. (Part 2 of "Existential Comfort in the Age of Hopkins and Greer")

A short history of the peak oil movement and reflections on wizards, Transition and the interstices of reason. Let us start with persona, since one goes to any prizefight to see the metaphorical battle of two created characters, embodying sides, virtues, faults.

In this Corna... John Michael Greer, owner (by a whisker over Bob Waldrop) of the finest beard in Peak Oildom, Archdruid, moral descendent of Toynbee and Gibbon, considerer of declines in centuries, not weekends. No Zombies for Greer - we are Rome, and we might as well deal with it, dammit.

in this Corna...Rob Hopkins, beardless founder of the Transition movement, permaculturist, endless energetic optimist and municipal leader, student of the first half of the British century, bent of reorganizing his community and the world to adapt to energy descent. If we could live without that energy once before, well, we can do it now, and let's get at it.

The peak oil debate is a case of history repeating itself: people have been ignoring warnings about exponential use of finite resources for a century and a half. No-one wants to hear the argument. Even International Energy Agency forecasts of record world oil demand, and warnings that the “era of cheap oil is over” made barely a ripple in the media.

-Americans want smaller homes, not McMansions
-HafenCity: A Case Study on Future-Adaptive Urban Development
-Straw Bale Model House

...now does seem to be an auspicious moment to hold forth with a new piece of Peak Oil theory, because this is the year when, for the first time, just about everyone is ready to admit that Peak Oil is real, in essence, though some are not quite ready to call it by that name.

In this post, I try to take a look at the amount of embodied carbon emissions, as well as the captured carbon in lumber etc, for an entire house, as well as a very quick comparison of the operating carbon emission to the embodied carbon emissions.

Proponents of the so-called "barbarian invasion" theory today warned of the "potentially disastrous" effects of hundreds of thousands of Visigoths, Huns, and Vandals plundering the imperial capital, including death, despoilment and dismemberment of the populace, and destruction of the city's ancient architecture and temples.

A report by the German armed services (the Bundeswehr) on the implications of peak oil on national security was leaked to the internet this week and picked up by Der Spiegel. The report, which was produced by the Future Analysis department of the Bundeswehr Transformation Centre, acknowledges that peak oil will happen, and that while estimates of the timing vary it could be any time from 2010 with the impacts on security likely to be felt 15 to 20 years later.

Peak oil will shrink the educational-industrial complex and we'll see substantial changes in priorities within and between different research areas and academic disciplines. Less funds will be allocated to "big science" and specialization will decrease. Neoclassical economics will compete in popularity with scientific communism and racial anthropology.

- China Cuts Rare Earth Export Quota 72%
- Rare earth minerals from China are rarer
- Why the world is running out of helium
- Time to close the global energy gap
- Putin opens Russian section of Siberian-Pacific oil pipeline

This week a study on peak oil by a German military think tank was leaked on the Internet. The document shows that the German government is closely studying the issue of peak oil, and is aware of the potential for serious consequences as oil production declines. The study is reminiscent of the Hirsch Report, commissioned by the U.S. Department of Energy, that warned of the risks posed by peak oil. ... Below is a friend's translation of the major points in the report.