Category Archives: Sustainable economy
Peak Oil Primer | Post Peak Living
Interesting New Developments
May 6, 2010 — Oxford University Lecturer of Politics Dr. Joerg Friedrichs in a paper published in Energy Policy asks: how is the U.S. likely to react as oil production declines? Will it follow the path of Cuba, North Korea, Imperial Japan or something completely different?
April 26, 2010 — Puru Saxena, Hong Kong Investment Manager and frequent guest on major media says, “We foresee a big energy crisis in the next two, three years. And I think we’re pretty much close to peak oil in terms of daily flow rates. This is not because of politics, this is not because of OPEC. This is because of geology. You cannot continue to increase the production of oil.”
April 11, 2010 — Report from U.S. Joint Forces Command points out that oil surplus could disappear by 2013 and oil production deficit could reach 10mb/d by 2015. Read more at The Guardian UK.
March 25, 2010 — Glen Sweetnam, director of the International, Economic and Greenhouse Gas division of the Energy Information Agency (EIA) used the following graph in a closed-door meeting:
He has since “voluntarily” been reassigned. Read more at
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POCKET PARaDIGMS BY SAM SMITH Advertising America Anthropology Baseball Balancing rights Beat generation Blame Budgets Bush Campaign Choice Cities Community Cooperation Culture Democratic Party Devolution Economics Elite Entropy Evolution Experts Freedom
This is not just about 9/11; it’s about America. It’s about us. It’s about what we have forgotten. Fear and a constant arousal of fear from media has driven some of these basic propositions from our minds. Let us remember.
“Many years ago some people built castles and walled cities and moats to keep the bad guys away. It worked for a while, but sooner or later spies and assassins figured out how to get across the moats and climb the walls and send balls of fire into protected compounds. The Florentines even catapulted dead donkeys and feces during their siege of Siena.
The people who built castles and walled cities and moats are all dead now and their efforts at security seem puny and ultimately futile as we visit their unintended monuments to the vanity of human presumption.
Like the castle-dwellers behind the moat, we are now spending huge sums to put ourselves inside a prison of our own making. It is unlikely to provide either security for our bodies nor solace for our souls, for we are simply attacking ourselves before others get a chance.
This is not the way to peace and safety. Peace is a state without violence, interrogations and moats. Peace is a state of reciprocity, of trust, of empirically based confidence that no one is about to do you in. It exists not because of intrinsic goodness or rampant naivete but because of a common, implicit understanding that that it works for everyone.
This discovery is often hard to come by, but it is still cheaper, less deadly, and ultimately far more effective than the alternative we seem to have chosen, which is to imprison ourselves in our castle and hope the moat keeps the others out.”
More on Economics & copyrights
“…it can become hard to grok once we get to a certain level”
Agreed there. I’ve just really been thinking about this idea for a few weeks so I’m far from grokking it myself. Particularly when it comes to the currencies we might use; I can’t get much beyond barter at the moment. I know that at points in history prior to and even after the creation of the Bank of England there were many local currencies but how they worked I’ve not researched enough to understand fully. And yes it seems to be an absolute/relative kind of thing. One wonderful piece of fiction that almost got me to understand it was Neal Stephenson’s “Baroque Cycle”. Gold/silver vs paper currencies. Monetary systems can be quite complex, as we’ve seen all too clearly with the credit derivatives crap the banks got into.
Originally posted as a comment by alex williams on Ethan Bauley Dot Com using Disqus.
