Australia & Oceania

- Former OPEC researcher on peak oil
- Science: Technology Is Turning U.S. Oil Around But Not the World's
- Former deputy prime minister of Australia: 'Peak everything'
- Peak oil moves to the mainstream

In order to achieve sustainability, we need scenarios of where we want to go: not only warnings and plans, but also reports as if we'd already made the transition. Who would have suspected they'd come from the South Pacific?

For nearly four decades, industrial hemp advocates have extolled the virtues of hemp (cannabis sativa, variety sativa), a plant whose cultivation is still banned in the US, thanks to its scandalous distant cousin, cannabis sativa, variety indica. The latter is the source of the illicit drug marijuana. The former produces good quality fiber and has a tetrahydrocannabinol (THC – the psychoactive ingredient in marijuana) concentration of 1% or less. The latter produces negligible usable fiber and has a THC concentration of 4-20%.

So why can't we legalise hemp in America?

Wellington's CSA offers a new model as a multi-stakeholder cooperative: it is currently the only New Zealand cooperative that exists for the mutual benefit of both consumers and producers. For growers, it seeks to create a return to help grow the farm, provide better farming resources, expand its own coverage, improve distribution mechanisms and promote the health values of producing food in this manner. The consumers appreciate the availability of nutritious healthy food, produced without leeching and destroying the land as modern industrial farming does, as well as the social benefits of working together voluntarily at the tasks involved in running their cooperative.

It sounds yucky at best, but mining sewage is growing in popularity, especially in Sydney, Australia, where a decade of drought forced some creative thinking about how to get, use and manage water.

The Australian Daily Telegraph published today a story on a leaked government report (BITRE 117) which (optimistically) calculated peak oil around 2017, followed by permanent decline. The report raises questions to be answered by the Federal Government.

An peak oil report for the Australian government has just surfaced. Although the report was finished in 2009, it apparently was never released to the public and does not appear on a government website.

Conclusion: "the prospects for the potential supply of world conventional petroleum liquids can be summarised as ‘flattish to slightly up for another eight years or longer (depending on the duration of the global economic slowdown) and then down’. Such a finding poses challenges for global transport and more generally, given the magnitude of the downturn foreseen for the rest of the century, and given the inertias inherent in our energy systems and transport vehicle fleets"

(Excerpts. Link to complete report.)

New Zealand will inevitably make a transition to a steady-state economy. The onset of energy descent — having less and less energy to use with each passing decade — will push it to do so sooner rather than later. The critical question is whether the transition to a steady-state economy will be by design or disaster.

When the time came to pull up stakes, our desire to pursue self-sufficiency meant that a destination with a temperate climate and reliable rainfall was a prerequisite. A job opportunity came, we did our research, weighed the pros and cons, and trusted intuition that this place offered better-than-average odds of weathering the gamut of changes that seemed to be imminent.

Monstrous as the consumer economy has become, consumer spending is not the biggest environmental problem. Most waste and pollution is caused by industrial, military and commercial processes, over which consumers have no control.

The following is the text of an address by Richard Heinberg to the Moana Nui Conference in Honolulu, November 12, 2011. Honolulu was concurrently hosting the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Conference; as a response to that secretive international trade meeting, the International Forum on Globalization and Pua Mohala Ka Po collaborated to organize Moana Nui.

- Peak oil conference in London Dec 6: Assessing PO's economic impact on global oil supply
- N. American oil output could top 40-year-old peak
- Peak oil and significant change for rural Australia

With more than half the world’s population living in cities we have been told that cites are where humanities future lies. At the same time, awareness of the future challenges humanity faces are growing...The cry has gone out for “sustainable cities” and urban planners the world over are responding. In most people’s (and urban planners) minds cities primarily consist of people to accommodate and methods to transport them...The problem with answering this question is that urban planners have forgotten the fundamental reason thing that allows cities to exist and that will determine their existence in future.

- There Will Be Oil, But At What Price?
- Alms for the Rich: How policies meant to promote alternative energies are actually hurting the middle class
- What Will Turn Us On in 2030? Fossil fuels vs ???
- Australia beats them all – in oil imports

For century upon century domestic animals have been bred with specialized traits suited to particular tasks or to live and prosper in specific climates or regions. Arguably these domesticated breeds are of significance equal to their brethren who live in the wild and just like their wild counterparts, many of the breeds are in danger of extinction. Indeed some breeds have already been lost.