Posts Tagged ‘Richard Heinberg’

Adapting to Post Industrialism

18/05/2010

Book Describes How to Transition

Adapt or Die

“If your town is not yet a Transition Town, here is guidance for making it one. We have little time, and much to accomplish.”
Richard Heinberg, Post Carbon Institute, Santa Rosa, California, author of ‘Power Down’ and ‘Peak Everything’

We live in an oil-dependent world, and have got to this level of dependency in a very short space of time, using vast reserves of oil in the process – without planning for when the supply is not so plentiful. Most of us avoid thinking about what happens when oil runs out (or becomes prohibitively expensive), but The Transition Handbook shows how the inevitable and profound changes ahead can have a positive outcome. These changes can lead to the rebirth of local communities, which will grow more of their own food, generate their own power, and build their own houses using local materials. They can also encourage the development of local currencies, to keep money in the local area.

The book has three sections, Read more

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We’ve Really Done It Now

03/05/2010

Gulf Oil Spill 2010, Image: Reuters, UK

I can’t help but think, with the Gulf oil spill, that we’re simply fleas on the back of a living organism that’s about to shake us off.  The spill is big. A retired expert mentioned this morning on The Power Hour internet radio show with Joyce Riley said there is not an easy way to stop such a huge oil spout, which is under such high pressure. It’s escaping the man-made hole created thousands of feet under the ocean’s surface. The expert actually said the only way he knew of containment, was to use an atomic blast, placed just in the right way, to seal the hole.

In any event, Chief Sealth from the Pacific Northwest was right, “We do not own the earth.”  This latest mishap by us, seems to really be screwing things up.  To be more informed on a culmination of “the perfect storm” read Richard Heinberg’s Peak Everything which addresses a number of issues which are peaking on our planet today.
Below if from Amazon’s page on Peak Everything.

Heinberg is Brilliant

From Publishers Weekly
In his latest, “Peak Oil” expert Heinberg (Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies) puts that theory in place alongside corresponding peaks in population, food production, climate stability and fresh water availability to paint a grim future of overlapping and accelerating global crises. For an introduction to Peak Oil, the idea that coming fossil fuel shortages will be sudden and drastic, readers should seek Heinberg’s earlier works; this volume assumes familiarity and addresses the challenges a post-carbon world poses for a global community “as reliant on hydrocarbons as it is on water, sunlight, and soil.” The worst-case scenario, “global economic meltdown” read more

Description of Peak Everything
The twentieth century saw unprecedented growth in population, energy consumption, and food production. As the population shifted from rural to urban, the impact of humans on the environment increased dramatically.

The twenty-first century ushered in an era of declines, in a number of crucial parameters:

* Global oil, natural gas, and coal extraction
* Yearly grain harvests (more…)

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