depletion
sastyk | April 23, 2012Note, I'm horrified to realize I inadvertantly left out the link to Rhagavan's piece - SO SORRY about that, and please do click through - it is well worth a full read.
Barath Rhagavan has a superb article about the conversion of many climate scientists to support of nuclear power and the reasons this is problematic. These match my own major objections to nuclear as a response. As serious as the environmental impact of failure is, that's not the single biggest issue I see. Even if I thought the siting would avoid any future climate related disasters (I don't), the main issue is the…
sastyk | August 30, 2011One of the hardest things for people to get their heads around is the fact that just because we can do something doesn't mean we will. For affluent people in the west in an era of rising energy availability, for the most part can and do went together. In an era of declining resource availability and declining wealth, however, many of us are likely to get to know the experience of much of the world, which is that what we can do doesn't have much to do with many people's experience..
One of the hardest concepts for many Americans to absorb is this - that technical feasibility rests on a…
sastyk | September 21, 2010Well, we've finally got a mostly-complete ASPO Conference schedule. The problem is exactly the sort of problem you'd really like to have when running one of these - that there are just too many serious thinkers who need a spot. It is really tough to finalize the conference schedule when every day you are receiving calls that say things like "This is Bianca Jagger, Chair of the Human Rights Foundation, calling to say that I'd like to speak at your conference on the connection between Climate, Energy Depletion and Human Rights...here are the texts of my UN speeches if you'd like to see them…
sastyk | March 23, 2010I came back to my computer to find that many of my fellow Sciblings have recently taken up issues of resource depletion from various interesting perspectives - doing my work for me, I guess ;-). It isn't exactly news to most of us that we've been using just about every resource on the planet far too casually, but it is interesting to see them tied together.
At Starts With a Bang, Ethan Siegel takes up issues raised by Helium's scarcity and the fact that our use of it to make children's toys may seriously imperil future research capacities.
At Dr. Isis's blog, she builds on this by exploring…
sastyk | March 4, 2010Note: This is another lightly revised version a piece I wrote some years ago at the oldest incarnation of this blog. It answers a question I get a lot - if people have been saying that the oil is going to run out for years, and if 30 years ago people thought we were going to have an ice age, why should I believe you that peak oil and climate change are real problems.
A lot of what I write works from the assumption that we all agree that peak oil and climate change are happening and going to be life-changing events. And yet, some people who read this blog don't necessarily agree on this…
sastyk | February 12, 2010I shouldn't complain - the Telegraph's energy columnist, Rowena Mason is technically affirming that even non-crazy people can believe in peak oil. Her essay, titled "You Don't Need to be a Mad Max Survivalist to Take Peak Oil Seriously" at least acknowledges the point. Her equation of Mad Max survivalism with "grows root vegetables" is obviously going to annoy me, but I know the kind of people she talks about in the article too, the ones who say we'd better hurry into our bunkers now, so I can forgive that.
But the part that is a little problematic is that she doesn't seem to get the oil…
sastyk | February 10, 2010Note: This is a lightly revised version of a post from ye olde blogge (actually ye older blogge, the original Casaubon's Book). At the time I wrote it, I didn't know about Dan Savage's brilliantly funny book on the seven deadly sins _Skipping Towards Gomorrah_ and if I had, I probably wouldn't have written this, since it seems so derivative in retrospect. But since I didn't, and it was a fun one to write, I'm re-running it here.
I got a very funny email from a correspondant who asked that I not use his name when I write this. He tells me that he's newly aware of peak oil and climate change…