Peak Oil on NPR: The Diane Rehm Show

This week, The Diane Rehm Show features peak oil. Click to listen here.

TIME....and TIME again!

Click here for full article "After the Oil Crisis, a Food Crisis?" This a second oil-related article I've found from TIME this week.

"Is the world headed for a food crisis? India, Mexico and Yemen have seen food riots this year. Argentines boycotted tomatoes during the country's recent presidential elections when the vegetable became more expensive than meat; and in Italy, shoppers organized a one-day boycott of pasta to protest rising prices. In late October, the Russian government, hoping to ease tensions ahead of parliamentary elections early next year, announced a price freeze for milk, bread and other foods through the end of January.

What's the cause for these shortages and price hikes? Expensive oil, for the most part."...

"...On the demand side, one of the key issues is biofuels. Biofuels, made from food crops such as corn, sugar cane, and palm oil, are seen as easing the world's dependence on gasoline or diesel. But when crude oil is expensive, as it is now, these alternative energy sources can also be sold at market-competitive prices, rising steeply in relation to petroleum.

With one-quarter of the U.S. corn harvest in 2007 diverted towards biofuel production, the attendant rise in cereal prices has already had an impact on the cost and availability of food. Critics worry that the gold rush toward biofuels is taking away food from the hungry. Jean Ziegler, the U.N. Special Rapporteur on The Right to Food, recently described it as a "crime against humanity" to convert food crops to fuel, calling for a five-year moratorium on biofuel production."

The Bloomington Alternative: Peaking out on oil

Full article featuring Bloomington, IN, city councilman here.

I'm planning on contacting this person to possibly help me create a dialogue with my community leaders regarding resource depletion, it's impact on our community, and how we're going to mitigate the impact fewer resources will have on us locally.

Peak Possibilities -- TIME

Read full article here.

....That's alarming enough in itself. Even the optimists think we have less than three decades to go? But at industry conferences this fall, the word from producers was far gloomier. The chief executives of ConocoPhillips and French oil giant Total both declared that they can't see oil production ever topping 100 million bbl. a day. The head of the oil importers' club that is the International Energy Agency warned that "new capacity additions will not keep up with declines at current fields and the projected increase in demand."....

....It's not that the world is running out of oil. There are massive reserves available in Canadian tar sands, Colorado shale, Venezuelan heavy oil and other unconventional deposits. The problem is that most of this oil is hard to extract and even harder to refine, and it isn't likely to account for a significant share of global production anytime soon. Almost everybody agrees that the pumping of conventionally sourced oil outside the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) has already peaked or will peak soon, a reality that even discoveries like the recent 8 billion-bbl. find off the coast of Brazil can't alter because production from so many existing fields is declining.....

Oil on Google Video Here

Peak Oil Discussed on the Wall Street Journal's front page

Excerpt:

A growing number of oil-industry chieftains are endorsing an idea long deemed fringe: The world is approaching a practical limit to the number of barrels of crude oil that can be pumped every day.

Some predict that, despite the world's fast-growing thirst for oil, producers could hit that ceiling as soon as 2012. This rough limit -- which two senior industry officials recently pegged at about 100 million barrels a day -- is well short of global demand projections over the next few decades. Current production is about 85 million barrels a day.

The world certainly won't run out of oil any time soon. And plenty of energy experts expect sky-high prices to hasten the development of alternative fuels and improve energy efficiency. But evidence is mounting that crude-oil production may plateau before those innovations arrive on a large scale. That could set the stage for a period marked by energy shortages, high prices and bare-knuckled competition for fuel.

The current debate represents a significant twist on an older, often-derided notion known as the peak-oil theory. Traditional peak-oil theorists, many of whom are industry outsiders or retired geologists, have argued that global oil production will soon peak and enter an irreversible decline because nearly half the available oil in the world has been pumped. They've been proved wrong so often that their theory has become debased.

The whole article can be read
here.

Money As Debt

I promise peak oil is included 31 minutes into this animation on money. Please share with all.

Back to the land - part 1

This is Part 1 in a 4 part series that was shown on BBC Wales. If you go to YouTube you can probably view the rest of the parts if you're interested. The same situation depicted in the documentary can be applied in the U.S., too.

Found a New Blog: Living Plastic Free in 2007

Click here for blog.

Oil Apocalypse on History Channel's Mega Disasters Tuesday

Just an FYI alert for all you peak oilers. The History Channel has included "Oil Apocalypse" in the field of Mega Disasters. It will air this Tuesday evening, November 13th at 11pm & Wednesday, November 14th at 3am (eastern time?). In the preview, Richard Heinberg was being interviewed. Check the History Channel for times in your area.

I also heard that during a prime-time football game today, T.Boone Pickens was discussing peak oil in between! How odd!

David Korten - The Great Turning