On the Level: Know Myself
by Rick Dubrow, Cascadia Weekly, Sept. 11, 2007
Two weeks ago my column entitled “Know Thyself” asked you to consider just how much you believe the dire reports regarding the health of our environment and, therefore, just how far you’re willing to go to change your own ecological footprint. To what degree do you believe in the upcoming, perfect storm of peak oil, climate change and increasing inequity? Will it really affect you, and how hard will it hit?
…Yes, I believe we’re banging on the door of environmental collapse, if collapse is defined as overshoot to the point of irreversibility. We’re touching a doorway we simply don’t know much about.
My own activism is driven by these beliefs; I’m not driven to inaction or paralysis. To the contrary, a close friend recently diagnosed me with CIS (Chronic Involvement Syndrome). I, for one, will not go down without trying. I believe that the scale and speed of curtailment we need to thrive needs leadership and political will as far from today’s offerings as I could possibly imagine.
No, I’m not hopeful. The barriers blocking “… the largest economical and political transformation the world has ever seen” seem overwhelming.
My greatest hope is that I’m wrong.
http://www.a1builders.ws/rss/cascadia_weekly_023.pdf

Jan Spencer’s Eco-Logical Kindrid Spirits Tour in Washington State, July, 2007
The goal of my trip was to meet eco minded people in a number of different locations and to find out from them what kind of positive on the ground models of eco logical culture existed where they live. I also made five public presentations on culture change, Okonagon, Bellingham, Snohomish/Everett, Seattle and Olympia. …I was excited to be crossing over the Cascades although, the morning was cloudy and showery, this on the east side. The west side offered spectacular if cloudy views of mountains, now pack above and dams below. And lush. Bellingham was my destination. My first visit. Late in the afternoon, I found Lynnette's place in an apartment complex...
See "fotos" and read more about Jan's visit to Bellingham:
http://www.suburbanpermaculture.org/Kindred%20tour.htm

Can Environmentalists Live Up to Their Own Standards?
by Janisse Ray, Orion Magazine, Sept. 10, 2007
If I ever preached to the choir, this luncheon was it. The sixty people in the room were professed environmentalists, all of them on the advisory council of an earth center at a college that advertises itself, rightfully, as strongly committed to environmental responsibility. Seated to my right was a friendly but road-weary woman who had arrived minutes before from Chicago. She had rented a car at the airport and driven straight here.

"When will you return home?" I asked.

"I'll go back this afternoon," she said.

My white cloth napkin lay folded in my lap. Two silver forks waited to the left of my plate. In minutes I would rise to speak at a meal for which and only for which one woman had flown from Illinois to North Carolina. In fact, I was speaking about the climate crisis. Could anything I said be worth those 750 pounds of carbon dioxide blasted into the atmosphere? Fifty-nine other people had journeyed here by various conveyances. Surely I was in part responsible.
http://www.alternet.org/environment/61872?page=1

Living Wealth: Better Than Money
by David Korten, YES! Magazine
If there is to be a human future, we must bring ourselves into balanced relationship with one another and the Earth. This requires building economies with heart.
If we are to slow and ultimately reverse the social and environmental disintegration we see around us, we must change the rules to curb the pervasive abuse of corporate power that contributes so much to those harms. Taming corporate power will slow the damage. It will not be sufficient, however, to heal our relationships with one another and the Earth and bring our troubled world into social and environmental balance. Corporations are but instruments of a deeper social pathology revealed in a familiar story our society tells about the nature of prosperity.
http://www.yesmagazine.org/article.asp?ID=1834
See also the interview of David Korten and Vandana Shiva by Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez on Democracy Now!:
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/09/14/1421257

See also http://www.energybulletin.net/34665.html for info on the Public Teach-In happening this week on the "triple global crisis" of climate change, peak oil, and global resource depletion happening this week, featuring David Korten, Richard Heinberg, Vandana Shiva, Bill McKibben, Michael Klare, Winona LaDuke, John Cavenagh, Jerry Mander, Ross Gelbspan, Frances Moore-Lappe, Helena Norberg-Hodge, David Suzuki and Randy Hayes.

Review: Renewable energy cannot sustain a consumer society
by Graham Strouts
Book Review:
Renewable Energy Cannot Sustain a Consumer Society
Ted Trainer
Springer 2007 hardback 197 pages

Ted Trainer, of the University of New South Wales, has made a valuable contribution to the literature of energy and resource depletion with his new book Renewable Energy Cannot Sustain a Consumer Society. The title says a lot I think. With the focus of most mainstream debate
on peak oil and energy being on the supply side - the oil is running low so what are we going to use instead? - Trainer brings a refreshing approach in which he provides a detailed and technically comprehensive analysis of existing renewable energy options- including wind, solar thermal, solar electric, biomass and energy crops, and hydrogen, as well as nuclear and the
issue of storing energy. He concludes:

“ ...we could easily have an extremely low per capita rate of energy consumption, and footprint, based on local resources- but only if we undertake vast and radical change in economic, political, geographical and cultural systems.”
http://www.energybulletin.net/34520.html

Fasting for the climate and self
by Jan Lundberg, Culture Change Letter
The Climate Emergency Fast continues.
After fasting over a week now for a cause, the first time I have done such a thing, I wanted to share my progress and reflections with Culture Change readers. Before doing so, here's the origin of this fast: On Sept. 4th the Climate Emergency Fast was begun as Congress came back into session, for the purpose of raising awareness for federal action to enact:

..."a moratorium on any new coal or coal-to-liquid plants; a national freeze on carbon emissions followed by major reductions; and a $25 billion down payment in fiscal year 2008 for conservation, efficiency and renewable energy programs."

...First, it's crucial to distinguish between what we would like to see happen and what will probably happen. It would be nice if there could be a seamless transition to a much cleaner-energy economy, whereby we would not have to make sacrifices or see upheaval. But peak oil has knocked at the door and there is no way out. Climate change has begun and is intensifying out of control. So, we ask, what about renewable energy? Can't that replace the petroleum infrastructure?
The answer is yes, but only spottily. This is because (1) it's not ready on a huge scale (and requires petroleum to implement it), (2), does not have the net-energy advantage of cheap oil that's already mostly gone, and (3) it cannot provide for today's consumer economy that relies on liquid fuels for distributing products such as food (which is grown increasingly with petroleum) -- given present overpopulation. Ten times as many units of petroleum energy go into agribusiness food production as the amount of energy that the produced food contains. Ahh, progress. Oops, did we max out our collective Petri dish?
http://culturechange.org

10 things we can do: Rebuilding civil society
David Roberts, Gristmill
It's not that individuals can't do anything about climate -- they just can't do it by themselves
---
I've been thinking about this debate over voluntary individual action and its place in the larger fight for sustainability (see here, here, and here). It's missing something.
A huge gulf has developed in America between public and private life. This has put green activism -- all of progressivism, actually -- on the horns of a dilemma. On the one hand, private life has become all but coextensive with consumerism -- what we choose to buy. Shifting consumer dollars around isn't a sufficient solution to any substantial problem. On the other hand, the levers that control the state are out of reach of the average citizen, even in a democracy. Most people are no longer accustomed to being actively involved in self-government.
To tackle environmental problems, we know we need governments to make big changes, but it's difficult to tell individuals what they should do about that. (Call their representatives? Vote? Then what?) We know individual changes will never add up to the societal shift we need, yet individual changes tend to be the ones that motivate, you know, individuals. We're reduced to hoping that small, ultimately ineffectual personal changes will open hearts and minds, leading to ... something.
Neither position is satisfying. What's missing is the middle ground, the space that used to mediate between private individuals and states. I'm talking about civil society: church groups, NGOs, professional associations, unions, affinity groups, etc.
http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2007/9/13/233756/402

PEAK OIL UPDATE: Chris Skrebowski on record high oil price
Interviewed by Julian Darley on Sept. 12, 2007
UK Petroleum Review editor Chris Skrebowski discusses today's $80 per barrel record high oil price with Global Public Media's Julian Darley. Skrebowski also talks about his expectations for the rest of 2007.
..For the last 9 to 10 weeks, [oil] stocks have been coming down...this consistent pattern of draining down just at a time when demand should be slackening off a bit, and this has rather un-nerved the markets...

...the expectation is that, although there is notionally more capacity to come on stream in this last quarter, everything this year has been disappointing in terms of things coming in late, things not working as well as people had hoped. So I wouldn't have too many hopes for a glorious flourish for the rest of the year. I think we've really got to now start taking seriously the idea that we are approaching the peak in oil production. Remembering that the peak won't occur all year until quite late in the process - what will happen first of all is that in effect you will be squeezed in the strongest demand quarter, which is typically the 4th Quarter, and sometimes the 1st Quarter of the following year. So I would anticipate very high prices and possibly even a degree of shortage over this coming winter period, unless the winter is exceptionally mild. Things will then ease off as you go into the much slacker 2nd Quarter. By the middle of next year, things will not be good, but they won't be looking too bad, and then you will possibly repeat this process of it getting really tight in the high demand quarters.

Julian Darley: Speaking of the high demand quarters, which are Q4, but also to some extent Q3 (that's the 3rd Quarter), looking at charts put out by the International Energy Agency (the IEA), one might wonder...about this question of whether the 3rd Quarter of 2007 in production and extraction will exceed that of 2006. Perhaps you could say when it is thought that we will know that, and what your expectation is - will Q3 2007 exceed 2006, and either way, what are the implications?

Chris Skrewbowski: If we look at the EIA figures, we find that quite literally since January 2005, there really has been minimal change...we seem to be on some sort of plateau. Now your question was, do I think we can break out of that plateau on the upside in the last quarter of this year. The answer is, notionally, we can. We also are beginning to get a better data handle on the rate of depletion that is occurring around the world. The best publicly available figures from the IEA Medium Term Report...show an average [deletion rate] of a bit over 4%. That's a pretty sobering thought. Total consumption is now around 85 million barrels of oil per day, 4% of that is about 3.2 to 3.3 million barrels a day. What we're saying is we've got to produce that each year to stand still. We've got to make that increment each year in effect to stand still, not to meet a single barrel of new consumption.

Julian Darley: You over the years have been compiling your megafield projects for oil and gas, you're in as good a position as anybody to say whether you think we can meet that depletion of more than 3 million barrels a year, and indeed exceed it with new production. Do you think that's going to happen?

Chris Skrewboski: Well, apparently the numbers tell us that 2007, 2008, 2009, were going to be the good years in terms of new production. This was going to be the period we were going to break out of this extended plateau and move to higher ground. All we can say at this point is we're now well into the 3rd quarter of 2007, and there's absolutely no sign of it. It's just not moving out. Now, production has been coming on stream, new fields have been commissioned, but obviously not enough.

...This is a world-wide picture, that we have very considerable oil field inflation going on in terms of the cost of things, we're short of skilled people, and virtually every major project is being delayed...it's a very unhappy picture really...we're stuck in a pretty high cost oil world at a time when there's concerns about economic activity and financial instability - they're all coming together to make life rather harder for us all.
http://globalpublicmedia.com/chris_skrebowski_on_record_high_oil_price

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