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Calm Before the Storm (Heinberg interview) (video)
Janaia Donaldson, Peak Moment #115
Richard Heinberg, author of “Peak Everything”, reviews the accelerating events since mid-2007, including the credit crunch and fossil fuel price volatility, noting that we’ve missed most of the best opportunities to manage collapse. He asks, “how far down the staircase of complexity will our global civilization have to go until we’re sustainable?” His answer: when managed properly, with deliberate simplification, not as far as we might otherwise. In addition to long term efforts to relocalize our economies, he advocates developing community “resilience” to withstand short-term catastrophic events like food shortages or extreme weather. Noting that healthy fear can move us into action, he encourages an attitude of clarity, concern and informed action in this “calm before the storm” that he feels is soon coming to an end. [www.richardheinberg.com]

Richard gave a presentation that evening titled “Kiss Your Gas Goodbye”. For a DVD, click on home. Janaia’s blog entry about the day is at journal.
(22 June 2008)
Video interview at original. Also at Global Public Media

UPDATE (July 13). An improved video version is available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AgZ_Ua6jtWM

Nigeria - The Significance of the Bonga Offshore Oil Platform Attack
Jeff Vail, The Oil Drum
On the heels of this weekend's Saudi Oil summit, Nigerian production has dropped to the lowest level in 25 years. This was in part because militant attacks shut in as much as 345,000 barrels per day of Nigerian production in the past few days. The Nigerian militant group MEND (Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta) has demonstrated a continuing ability to interrupt production from Nigeria's mature, onshore fields. However, the future promise of Nigerian oil is not onshore. Rather, it is the 1.25 million barrels per day of offshore production scheduled to come on line in the next 6 years. Analysts previously believed these offshore facilities were out of MEND's reach.

This assumption--that far offshore facilities are beyond the reach of militants--must now be reconsidered. The week's most successful attack, shutting in 225,000 barrels per day, came against Shell's Bonga facility. At 120 km offshore, the Bonga attack demonstrated a new militant capability in the offshore environment. As Nigeria is one of the few states with the geological potential to significantly increase oil production and exports, the Bonga attack may prove to be an extremely important development.
(24 June 2008)
An earlier version is available on Jeff's website.

Books: 'Profit From the Peak' Q and A
Authors Discuss Peak Oil, Energy Markets, Alternative Fuels and Recent Offshore Drilling Proposals
Brian Hicks and Chris Nelder, Washington Post
Brian Hicks and Chris Nelder, authors of " Profit From the Peak: The End of Oil and the Greatest Investment Event of the Century" were online Monday, June 23 at 1 p.m. ET to discuss energy markets, alternative fuels, the future of gas prices and proposals for oil and gas exploration off U.S. coasts.

The transcript follows.

Hicks worked for Agora Publishing, one of the largest financial newsletter publishers in the world, for ten years before helping to found Angel Publishing. In addition to being the managing editor of Energy and Capital and The $20 Trillion Report, Hicks writes a weekly column for Wealth Daily.

Nelder is a self-taught energy expert who has intensively studied peak oil for five years, and written hundreds of articles on peak oil and energy in general for Energy and Capital and other publications.

... Leesburg, Va.: Given the Hirsch Report, "Twilight in the Desert," Sadad al-Huseini, etc., what scenarios do you forecast (deep recession, depression, collapse) and for how long? What human settlement patterns, agricultural methods and technological shifts do you expect will bring us out of the morass?

Chris Nelder: Unfortunately it would take about another whole book to answer that question! My guess is that we will experience about a 30- or 40-year global recession, as we try to fill the gap of declining fossil fuels. Over that time, I expect a renaissance in subsistence farming and self-sufficiency. But I don't think anybody could say, certainly not me, whether the 22nd Century will look more like an advanced eco-topia, or more like the 17th Century..
(23 June 2008)
Quite a coup for Hicks and Nelder to appear on the Washington Post site. The number of authors who have addressed peak oil in the pages of the Washington Post can be counted on the fingers of one, maybe two hands: the Post car columnist, James Kunstler a few weeks ago, and one or two others. -BA

Penetration
James Howard Kunstler, blog
The telling moment last week was Robert Hirsch's appearance on the CNBC morning "Squawkbox" financial show in which he proposed the probability of $500-a-barrel oil within "a three-to-five-year time-frame." Squawkhead Becky Quick was clearly nonplussed by the stolid Mr. Hirsch, author of a (then)-startling 2005 US Dept of Energy report (since referred to as the Hirsch Report and buried by the Secretary of Energy) that warned of dire effects on the American way of life as the Peak Oil predicament gained traction.

Perhaps more reality-challenged was the uber-idiot Larry Kudlow on CNBC's night-time money show, who kept repeating the mantra "drill, drill drill" when presented with signs that something other than "oil speculators" was driving up the price and creating global scarcity. These idiots always return to the shibboleth that "there's plenty of oil out there." What they don't get is that even while the world is enjoying the all time peak of production (somewhere around 85-million barrels-a-day), that same world is demanding at least 86-million barrels -- so even though there's more oil than ever, there's not enough. And the gap is only bound to get bigger.

The difference between what's available and what's demanded is being felt by poor countries and poor people in richer countries. Third world nations lacking their own oil are simply dropping out of the bidding, and the lower classes in the US are having to choose between buying gasoline and velveeta.
(23 June 2008)