Conventional oil

Outrageous, snarky, “madly engaging,” bileful—these are a few of the terms that have been used to describe author and social critic James Howard Kunstler. But he’s actually a great deal more than these things, as anyone who's really come to know him, even if only through his books and Internet postings, can tell you. His most personal writings reveal a human, vulnerable, wonderfully versatile, cheerful side that few people know exists.

One of the perennial themes of peak oil discussion over the last decade or so has been what the world will look like once the age of cheap abundant energy comes to a close. While the arguments are ongoing, the answer may already have arrived. With a tip of the hat to green economist Herman Daly, the Archdruid explains.

Having written extensively on occultism and the esoteric, and himself an adept in ritual magic, John Michael Greer is an eager student of the unexplained. Yet he's also a sharp observer of the unexamined assumptions that people make about the physical world around them, and how these assumptions have helped land the world in its present crisis. One common presupposition is that nature is independent of the world of human economics, and thus can be treated as a disposable resource. An environmentalist and a devout follower of the druid path, Greer knows better, and he’s written several books seeking to dispel this mistaken dismissal of nature.

- EIA shale predictions need closer scrutiny, peak oil group says (ASPO-USA)
- Cassandra in the 21st century: ASPO-Italy 5 in Florence on Oct 28
- Saving energy: reliability of national energy flows (PDF) (Jean Laherrère of ASPO-France) - UPDATED
- Jeff Rubin: Peak Oil Is About Price, Not Supply
- Soaring prices push Queen close to ‘fuel poverty’

- WaPo: Was Wall Street to blame for high oil prices?
- Yergin: The perils, prizes and pitfalls of the post-Gaddafi era of oil
- U.S. and Saudi Relations on Oil
- McKibben: The Cronyism Behind a Pipeline for Crude

“Imagining a world without oil” describes in stark detail what might happen if one day the world decided to decommission all its oil tankers, rigs, pipelines and strategic reserves. The authors, environmental scientist Steve Hallett and journalist John Wright, expect that we’d initially see sky-high prices and long lines at pumps. After a few weeks, fuel wouldn’t be had at any price and even first-world citizens would struggle to stay fed and out of the elements. This is no Hollywood doomsday scenario—it’s a levelheaded extrapolation from current trends in the fast deteriorating world energy situation. [An essay prefiguring the book originally appeared in The Washington Post.]

In the several years or so since peak oil began generating significant literature and debate, it has attracted a diverse array of thinkers. To name a few, there are insiders like Colin Campbell and Ken Deffeyes who sounded the first warnings; a clinical psychologist in the field of “peak oil blues,” Kathy McMahon; an archdruid practiced in nature’s less readily perceptible energies, John Michael Greer; and a couple of highly engaging social critics, Jim Kunstler and Dmitry Orlov. Richard Heinberg’s distinction is that he’s hands-down the most prolific peak oil author, now having written half a dozen books on the subject and a few others touching on it tangentially. His latest, The End of Growth, is yet another grand performance.

Neither an economist nor a formally trained scholar, Dmitry Orlov is perhaps best described in his own words, as “more of an eyewitness” to the phenomenon on which he writes. He’s a Russian émigré who saw the Soviet Union fall firsthand and has been drawing on this experience in warning of the coming U.S. collapse. He came to fame five years ago with a smash-hit Internet article that won him a loyal following and a subsequent book deal. The book, Reinventing Collapse, is now in its second edition—and regardless of how well it holds up to scholarly scrutiny, it’s admirable in its wit and prodigious street smarts.

User’s Guide to the Crisis of Civilization shows how our major crises share the same root causes and thus can be solved only by taking into account their complex interactions. Ahmed acknowledges that in this age of specialization it's understandable for issues like climate change and oil depletion to be studied and discussed separately—indeed, he observes that this mode of inquiry into the causes of specific phenomena has enabled many of our greatest scientific advances. But it’s also, he argues, beginning to seem like an increasingly antiquated method, preventing experts from seeing the whole picture and the public from receiving consistent information.

Reviews of three novels set in the wake of the oil age:
- Player One by Douglas Coupland
- Ship Breaker by Paolo Bacigalupi
- Afterlight by Alex Scarrow.

This past week was supposedly the week of the game changer in the world of oil. Leaked U.S. diplomatic cables from Saudi Arabia called into question the ability of the globe's largest oil exporter to raise production to satisfy a world increasingly thirsty for petroleum. In the United States a technique called hydraulic fracturing--which has seemingly unlocked vast natural gas resources--will now be applied to oil trapped in shale deposits. Are these two developments really the so-called game changers they are claimed to be?

The latest round of price spikes in food crops and petroleum sparked a corresponding round of predictions insisting that collapse can be expected shortly. Behind these claims is a foreshortening of historical perception that makes short term variations seem more important than the broader and slower patterns that drive them. Still, there's one detail these claims get right; it's now possible, with a fair degree of certainty, to put a specific date to the beginning of America's catabolic collapse; the Archdruid explains.

If you write about, speak about, or talk with your family, friends and co-workers about peak oil, you've almost certainly been asked: "Well, who else is saying what you're saying?"

Economist Paul Krugman almost addressed the Limits to Growth in his recent article "The Finite World", but pulled back before reaching the brink of suggesting there may be physical limits to economic growth. A Nobel Prize may await whomever finds a workable model to prosper human welfare under conditions of depleting resources. Will economists solve this problem, or ordinary people who are learning to live better in The Finite World?

A year ago peak oil author Dave Cohen christened 2009 "A Year We Will Live To Regret." But as it happens, 2010 has brought its own mother lode of discouragement, failure and tragedy. It began on the heels of the bungled climate change summit in Copenhagen, a major blackout in southern France and news of a disastrous crash in Yemen's oil revenues. Before the year had rounded its halfway mark, it had presided over the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, the worst environmental disaster in U.S. history. And as if all this weren't enough, 2010 also saw the sudden and unexpected death of one of the very icons of the peak oil movement, the revered Matthew R. Simmons.