Reinventing collapse
As George Carlin once said, “they call it the American dream because you have to be asleep to believe in it”. At the risk of this blog becoming ‘review corner’, that seems the perfect introduction to the book I just finished reading — Dmitry...
Focus on Climate Change and ignore Peak Oil? Not good enough
Lately I seem to be encountering many climate change activists who have a blind spot when it comes to peak oil. At present, Friends of the Earth appear to be particularly prone to this. They assert that climate change is overwhelmingly urgent (no arguments from me...
Peak oil scepticism becomes increasingly desperate
The old standby argument of the so-called ‘peak oil sceptics’ was that if we really were facing geological limits to oil extraction rates then prices would be rising rapidly. Since prices were relatively stable there was clearly no impending problem. And...
TEQs (downstream) or Cap and Dividend (upstream)?
In the climate policy community there is a growing debate between advocates of ‘upstream’ and ‘downstream’ carbon caps (dams?). The terms draw an analogy between the flow of water in a stream and the flow of energy through an economy. ‘Upstream’ advocates want to regulate the few dozen fuel and energy companies that bring carbon into the economy, arguing that this is cheaper and simpler than addressing the behaviour of tens of millions of ‘downstream’ consumers.
At first glance this seems a convincing argument, but there is one important regard in which an upstream scheme fails — it does not engage the general populace in the changes required.
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