Energy Bulletin

In the last post of our Sustainable Relationships week (and a half!) we consider perhaps the most challenging relationship of all: with our fellow Transitioners. Here are some reflections posted yesterday on the Social Reporting Project in response to The Transition Companion's first Ingredient.

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-Energy independence, or impending oil shocks?
-Oil: In perpetuity no more
-Saudi Aramco to Re-Open Oldest Field to Tap Heavy Oil, EIU

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Think you know what big business looks like? Think again. According to Charles Gould, Director-General of the International Cooperative Alliance, cooperatives are poised to be the fastest growing business model by 2020.

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I knew I needed a secret crying place when my mother died. We were living the suburban life then, but had managed to turn our big backyard into a kind of secluded garden with a chicken coop at the center of it. I would sit on an overturned bucket in the coop, hidden from everything except the chickens, and weep with abandoned, remembering my mother, who was always singing. The chickens would cock their heads sideways, staring as only chickens can do, and maybe sing a little too, as if to comfort me.

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Though there's been a flurry of books about the Occupy movement in the last few months, few of them have said much about energy and the environment. Predictably, writers have largely focused so far on the core issues that originally filled Zuccotti Park last fall, an unfair economy and politics corrupted by corporate lucre.

Now comes a new title on Occupy that takes ecological overshoot seriously, Occupy World Street: A Global Roadmap for Radical Economic and Political Reform. Refreshingly, the book also zeroes in on the issue that the energy-savvy find behind all our financial and political woes today: peak oil.

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The Occupy movement is beginning to discover the commons, and the result could be a rich and productive collaboration. This was the lesson that I took from a three-day conference, “Making Worlds: A Forum on the Commons,” hosted by Occupy Wall Street in Brooklyn this past weekend. Rarely have I seen so many ordinary people from diverse backgrounds embrace the commons idea with such ease and enthusiasm.

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When I first approached the topic of societal energy in 2004, I became aware for the first time that our energy future was not in the bag, and proceeded to explore alternative after alternative to judge the viability and potential pitfalls of various options. I have retraced my steps in Do the Math posts, exposing the scales at which different energy sources might contribute, and the practical complexities involved. My spooky campfire version of the story, a la Tolkien: The Way is Shut.

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- Monbiot: We need to know who funds these thinktank lobbyists
- Climate scientist Peter Gleick admits he leaked Heartland Institute documents
- On the environment Canada is a rogue state
- Stark warning emerges from AAAS summit: science is ‘under siege’

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All this new technology seems to say there may be some hope for life after oil. For now the two biggies seem to be cold fusion and cheap hydrogen, but neither of these are as yet sure for the immediate future. It seems likely we are going to have much more efficient motor vehicle within the next 10 years and probably longer range electric vehicles. There might even be enough biofuels to run our airplanes.

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- Oil price hits eight-month high on Iran-Israel war fears
- Iran Warns of Pre-emptive Action in Nuclear Dispute
- Iran Raid Seen as a Huge Task for Israeli Jets
- Out of their own mouths
- Ring of Iranian Bases Threatens US (sic)
- Top Ten Ways Iran is Defying US, EU Oil Sanctions and How You are Paying for It All

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Coal seemed to have peaked in 1990, but it was an illusion. The growth of coal production during the first decade of the 21st century has been impressive; never seen before in history. So, King Coal is coming back and he may soon reclaim the title of ruler of the energy world that it had lost to crude oil in the 1960s.

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- Interview with ex-Shell CEO Hofmeister: changes tune after debate with peak oil researcher?(video and transcript)
- The Achilles' Heel of Algal Biofuels - Peak Phosphate
- What EROI tells us about ROI
- Prix de l'essence record : le pouvoir en place n'anticipe rien, c'est consternant

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- Transition: Unlocking Sonoma’s collective genius
- Standing on Your Own Two Feet: Young Adults Surviving 2012 and Beyond (free online book)
- Building Sustainable Future Needs More Than Science, Experts Say
- Toward Global (Environ)Mental Change

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When you fall in love, it's all about what you have in common, and you can hardly imagine that there are differences, let alone that you will quarrel over them, or weep about them, or be torn apart by them -- or if all goes well, struggle, learn, and bond more strongly because of, rather than despite, them. The Occupy movement had its glorious honeymoon when old and young, liberal and radical, comfortable and desperate, homeless and tenured all found that what they had in common was so compelling the differences hardly seemed to matter.

Until they did.

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Windrush Farm in Chileno Valley, California stands as one of our communities most endearing fiber and farming hubs. Founded in 1995 by Mimi Luebbermann, the farm grew from an intention of living simply, farming fiber, and functioning as a quiet space for Luebbermann's longstanding writing career. The farm has since become a destination for Bay Area spinning and knitting groups, seasonal craft fairs, and during the summer the place is transformed by Luebbermann and her son Arann Harris, into the "best home-grown, grass-fed, tree-climbing, organically-run, farm camp around"… for a host of children from the surrounding area.

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The second part of Fleeing Vesuvius is entitled "Innovation in business, money and finance." It draws on the main theme of Part I, describing how the current economic crisis is a direct result of fossil fuel scarcity and spiking energy costs. The second section focuses on the link between energy availability and money.

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In addition to Wall Street speculators, the other dominant forces of the U.S. economy over the past three decades have been global firms like General Electric, Exxon Mobil, and Apple. These firms spread their global assembly lines and resource extraction to countries like Mexico, China, and the Philippines where, in a quest for cheaper costs, they can more easily evade worker rights and environmental regulations. This global corporate economy pits U.S. workers and communities against poorly enforced Third World worker rights and environmental rules in a “race to the bottom” in terms of rights and standards. These global firms simply say to governments and workers: lower your wages and standards or we will move our operations elsewhere. They either get what they want or they move.

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Where once American plowmen had merely to contend with unpredictable weather, infertile soil, inaccessible water supplies, poverty, accidents and disease, today’s food producers face a further cornucopia of sophisticated and bewildering attacks from all sides. That fewer than one percent of Americans want to wrestle a crop from abused soil, while attempting to anticipate how global warming or ailing honeybees may thwart them, should surprise no one.

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Bottom Line: In the world we must strive to achieve, however difficult or implausible it may seem today, expanded extraction of the tar sands has no place.

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The long-held contention that rural forest communities are the prime culprits in tropical forest destruction is increasingly being discredited, as evidence mounts that the best way to protect rainforests is to involve local residents in sustainable management.

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