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Michael Moore talks to Larry King about Peak Oil
Larry King Live, via YouTube at Global Public Media
Spurred by a viewer's question about gas prices, Michael Moore talks about the breadth of the problem of peak oil: petroleum is not just a fuel, but a feedstock for most of the material bases for our life.

[YouTube at original]
(30 Apr 2008)

Kevin Phillips interview: Bad Money: Reckless Finance, Failed Politics, and the Global Crisis of American Capitalism” (audio and video)
Amy Goodman, Democracy Now
Renowned political analyst Kevin Phillips argues successive administrations have imperiled the U.S. economy by a combination of short-sighted policies and a trend against regulation. These include unparalleled credit-card debts, the expansion of financial industries such as hedge funds, ballooning national debts, and deliberately altering statistics like inflation and unemployment to mask the accurate picture.

With the collapse of the housing market and the rise in oil prices, much attention has been paid to the question of whether the U.S. is in a recession. But is it possible the nation’s economic well-being is in even deeper financial straits? A new book by the renowned political analyst Kevin Phillips argues it is. Phillips says successive administrations have imperiled the U.S. by a combination of short-sighted policies and a trend against regulation. These include unparalleled credit-card debts, the expansion of financial industries such as hedge funds, ballooning national debts, and deliberately altering statistics like inflation and unemployment to mask the accurate picture.

A generation ago Phillips wrote “The Emerging Republican Majority” which Newsweek described as the “political bible of the Nixon administration.” Throughout the 1970s and 1980s Phillips was viewed as one of the GOP’s top theoreticians and electoral analysts. But today he’s considered one of the leading critics of U.S. political culture.

Kevin Phillips” latest book is “Bad Money: Reckless Finance, Failed Politics, and the Global Crisis of American Capitalism.”
(6 May 2008)
One of the problems that Phillips sees is peak oil, which he foresees within the next few decades. The references occur at about 5 and 12:30 minutes into this segment of Democracy Now. -BA

The ASPO-Italy conference in Torino
Ugo Bardi, The Oil Drum: Europe
The second national conference of the Italian section of ASPO, ASPO-Italy, was held in Torino on May 3rd. Among the speakers, many were well known to readers of TOD. We had Euan Mearns as guest of honor, but also Ugo Bardi, Pietro Cambi, Marco Pagani and Eugenio Saraceno; all of them have signed posts on The Oil Drum.

The conference's language was mainly Italian. It is a general problem: a lot of good work on depletion is being done in many non-English speaking countries. However, translations are expensive and time consuming; so the interaction with the rest of the world is limited. The best that I can do here is summarizing what was said so that you can have a feeling of what is being done in Italy and how the situation is here.

First, something about ASPO-Italy. It is not so much geology-centered as ASPO international is. It is mostly a group of technology-minded people, several are specialists in renewable energy. They have quickly understood the question of the peak and they have derived from it a sensation of urgency that something is to be done, and fast. It was for this reason that we chose as logo of the conference not just the traditional ASPO peak, but also the "post peak car", the retrofitted, battery powered, Fiat 500 created by Pietro Cambi. This little car has become a sort of symbol of the emphasis of ASPO-Italy for solutions.

ASPOItaly-2 was perhaps the first post-peak ASPO conference in the world. Recognizing that crude oil may be already in decline, we chose to focus on natural gas with the help of Euan Mearns, from The Oil Drum, who spoke about the security of European gas supply. I think I don't have to say that the picture that emerged out of the several talks on depletion was not optimistic. The second part of the conference was dedicated to solutions, with a presentation on what we might call the Italian answer to peak oil: high altitude wind power (www.kitegen.com) developed by Massimo Ippolito. It is a very promising idea but still in the early prototyping stage.

How about impact? Well, we had some but, despite crude at 120 $/barrel, peak oil is not mainstream news in Italy. We were interviewed in TV, something appeared in the newspapers, something more will appear in the coming days. On the whole, however, in Italy people are ignoring peak oil and everything that has to do with resource depletion; just as the rest of the world is doing. The day after the conference, going back home, we saw the A1 highway packed with cars: a long parking lot: hundreds of kilometers. It should not be a surprise: if we are at the production peak it is the historical moment of the largest amount of oil available. The point is for how long.

But it may well be that Italy will be the first industrialized country in the world to experience peak oil for real. Economically weak, strongly dependent on fossil fuels, Italy, despite being known as the "Sun Country", has done nothing exploit renewable energy to weaken her addiction to oil. Italy may well be the miners' canary of peak oil. The national carrier, Alitalia, may be the first major airline in the world to go bankrupt because of high oil prices. Not just Alitalia, but the whole country may go bankrupt if a major supply crisis arrives. It will be an interesting story; stay tuned!

The site of ASPOItaly is at www.aspoitalia.net. It is mostly in Italian, but it has a small section in English. The blog of the association is at www.aspoitalia.blogspot.it, all in Italian
(5 May 2008)
More links at original.

Peak oil explains lack of UFOs
Andrew Leonard, Salon
In my previous incarnation as a technology reporter covering the free software movement during the dot-com boom heyday, I was constantly running into Tim O'Reilly, founder and CEO of the computer book publisher O'Reilly Media. I was even a part-time employee of his company for about six months at one of the earliest entrants in online publishing, Web Review. But as my focus gravitated away from software and Internet culture towards economic affairs, energy issues, and globalization, I've lost touch with the world in which O'Reilly is a significant player.

But all worlds collide. And now Tim O'Reilly, writing in his online column, joins the ranks of those worried about the challenges of climate change and peak oil. But he throws a great new angle into the mix -- the Fermi Paradox.

... In other words, we haven't encountered alien space-faring civilizations because all such alien races that developed the technological capacity for space-flight smacked head on into peak oil and then reverted back to barbarism, or some other form of pre-Industrial Revolution social arrangement.

I like it -- a nice tidy unified theory that connects the price of gasoline to the absence of evidence for alien life.
(6 May 2008)
Theory makes sense: a one-time spurt of growth punctuated by a peak. Is this inevitable for any species that learned to exploit a source of concentrated (but limited) high-quality energy? We will find out. -BA

Suzuki on PO and climate at Caribbean tourism conference
South Florida Caribbean News
One of the world’s most vocal environmental activists delivered an impassioned plea to delegates at the 10th Annual Caribbean Conference on Sustainable Tourism today: minimize our footprint on the Earth before it is too late.

Dr. David Suzuki, the Canadian geneticist, best-selling author and television host, opened the conference as its keynote speaker before a capacity crowd, which included heads of state from various Caribbean Tourism Organization (CTO) member countries. Dr. Suzuki challenged these leaders, and all gathered in the room, to not sacrifice the future for short-term economic gain.

... According to Dr. Suzuki, “Island people, better than most, understand limits, and that resources are finite. Looming ahead for the entire world is the great crisis of our economy, peak oil, the moment when available oil supplies are all known and being exploited so that supplies will inexorably fall.

“The twin crises of ecological degradation and falling oil supplies will have massive repercussions for all countries, but none more so than those of the Caribbean and especially the tourism industry” said Dr. Suzuki.

Dr. Suzuki cited the challenges facing the airline industry in the coming years. “Air travel leaves the heaviest carbon footprint among all modes of transportation and skyrocketing fuel prices are already having explosive effects,” he said.
(6 May 2008)