Transition Culture

An Evolving Exploration into the Head, Heart and Hands of Energy Descent

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Archive for “Peak Oil” category

Showing results 571 - 575 of 635 for the category: Peak Oil.


27 Jan 2006

The Alberta “Oil Rush” on Radio 4.

tarsBBC Radio 4’s **In Business** programme this week, “There’s Oil in Them Thar Sands” looked at the white elephant that is the Alberta tar sands. It really confirmed my suspicions that if the Alberta tar sands are the best we can do we are really in trouble. In Business is a weekly programme that looks at directions and trends in business, and this week it explored the oil sands from the economic and business angle. Alberta is estimated to contain 175 billion barrels of oil, which puts Canada into the top 4 or 5 oil producing countries in the world. Tar sands are far more expensive to produce than most other sources of oil, but with the price of oil rising and rising, these harder-to-extract oil sources become increasingly financially viable. Oil companies are moving into the area, and

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Discussion: 3 Comments

Categories: Energy, Peak Oil


26 Jan 2006

Think-and-Do-Tanks … learning from the Neo-Cons.

Think TankOne thing that really struck me when I attended a lecture Bernard Lietaer gave the other week, was when he talked about the need for us to set up what he called **’Think and Do Tanks’**. He talked about the neo-cons in the US, we may not like them very much but they have been highly successful at making their vision for the world a reality. They didn’t just have an idea. They also worked out the fine details of how to implement it, prepared budgets and also drafted the legislation that would be required. They lobbied Congress very skillfully and now here we are as their vision starts to become reality around the world. If you aren’t sure what their vision is, then I suggest you read

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25 Jan 2006

Plan B revisited – now with added Peak Oil!

Plan B**Lester Brown** is one of the most influential environmental analysts around, and founded the Earth Policy Institute. He has written many books, generally packed with information and detail, and rarely containing much information that would send you skipping and dancing in the street. His latest book, Plan B – rescuing a planet under stress and a civilisation in trouble, was his attempt at an emergency plan for saving the world. While it is insightful and excellent, I found it rather frustrating in that what I would regard as the single biggest challenge, i.e. peak oil, wasn’t mentioned once. It is interesting to observe that Brown has now carried out a major rewrite of Plan B, and a new edition has just be published called Plan B 2.0, which has now taken peak oil

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Discussion: 1 Comment

Categories: Economics, Energy, Peak Oil


25 Jan 2006

Kuwait – the tumbling house of cards…

fallingdownLast week Petroleum Intelligence Weekly reported a leak from within the **Kuwait Oil Company** which revealed that Kuwaiti oil reserves are actually around half what they have been reporting for the last 20 years, down from 99bn barrels to 48 bn barrels. While this should have been the biggest news story of 2006, and splashed across headlines around the world, it was reported by Reuters, but other than that barely made any of the papers I searched through for it. In a nutshell, overnight the world lost 5% of its total oil reserves, and that could just be the tip of the iceberg.

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Discussion: 3 Comments

Categories: Peak Oil, Politics


24 Jan 2006

Iran’s Oil Exchange threatens the Greenback

dollars*Here is an article I just came across which struck me as really important, and which you should read in order to make sense of events happening around Iraq at the moment. I don’t make a habit of posting articles from elsewhere, but this is an important piece. International events make much more sense when we understand what is going on behind the scenes.*
**Iran’s Oil Exchange threatens the Greenback** – by Mike Whitney of OpEdNews.com.

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Discussion: 3 Comments

Categories: Economics, Peak Oil, Politics