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News from the internets

by Paula | 15 November 2008 | permalink | comments
Tags: news, peak oil
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Robert Hirsch tells the peak oil in-crowd to chill @ WSJ:

In a memo “To The Peak Oil Community,” Hirsch recommends that the group “minimize its effort to awaken the world to the near-term dangers of world oil supply.”

His rationale is itself plenty grim. “If the realization of peak oil along with its disastrous financial implications was added to the existing mix of troubles, the added trauma could be unthinkable,” he wrote to his colleagues.

Hirsch sent his memo to a Who’s Who of the peak movement, including retired petroleum geologist Colin Campbell; investment banker Matt Simmons; Swedish peak-oil scholar Kjell Aleklett; and Steve Andrews, director of the U.S. Association for the Study of Peak Oil.

Full text of the memo is posted at WSJ. I’m not sure what the revered Dr. Hirsch might think will happen. Gas prices are down to $2/gal, that means peak oil has been a hoax all along, right? No one’s paying attention.

Fantastic analysis of WEO going on @ TOD — There’s more than one article but what strikes my fancy, in particular, is the introduction of a new and really useful concept to peak oil lingo: MegaJoules per dollar, or MJ/$. This will make it much easier to talk about why things like biofuels, tar sands, deep-water drilling and the like simply cannot replace petroleum.

Identifying bailout recipients @ BailoutSleuth.com — BailoutSleuth.com, one of Mark Cuban’s projects, is compiling a list of organizations receiving bailout money, culled from press releases and news reports; meanwhile, financial media firm Bloomberg has filed a FoI lawsuit to force Fed to disclose the recipients, which Fed says it would keep secret.

Traditional guerrilla groups are switching from ideology-driven agendas to economic agendas @ Global Guerrillas — John Robb describes how guerrilla groups are cashing in on nation-states’ inability to provide basic services and safety, thereby bolstering their own effectiveness. I read Robb’s blog because the stuff he writes about has tremendous relevance to small business and entrepreneurship as our own Western governments lose legitimacy and our economies deteriorate. If you’re not reading Robb’s blog you need to be. This post makes me wonder: are guerrilla groups actually modeling the structure of post-peak economies? Ten years from now, will there be any appreciable difference between an entrepreneur and a guerrilla? Is there now? If there is, is that difference something that needs to be enhanced or erased?

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