Transition Culture has moved
I no longer blog on this site. You can now find me, my general blogs, and the work I am doing researching my forthcoming book on imagination, on my new blog.
Come find me at robhopkins.net
25 Sep 2007
Ray Leonard of the Kuwait Energy Company was the speaker who, for me, stole the show. He offered, prefaced with a few caveats, insights from within the oil industry, setting out how what the oil industry tells the public and what it actually thinks are very different. One got a sense from listening to Leonard of the degree of profound unease behind closed oil company doors, as year after year they have to downsize their declared reserves and find themselves less and less able to be optimistic.
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24 Sep 2007
In theory this should be “In Praise of Dr. James Schlesinger”, but I can’t quite bring myself to praise someone who used to be the head of the CIA and was the former US Energy Secretary who allegedly proposed the invasion of Saudi Arabia in order to protect US oil interests. Rather it was what he had to say that was praiseworthy and rather fascinating. Schlesinger’s message to the conference was summed up in his statement was “we are all peakists now. Conceptually the battle is over, the peakists have won”.
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21 Sep 2007
Just back from Ireland after a great few days. I travelled there on the coach, which wasn’t as grueling as I feared it would be (honestly). It was my first time back there after 2 years away, and it was delightful to see old friends and places. The first two days were spent at the ASPO 6 conference in the City Hall (I’ll tell you about what I did afterwards when I have finished my ASPO 6 musings). ASPO 6 was a great improvement on ASPO5, a much higher standard of presentations, more debate and discussion, a broader range of subjects and (thankfully) less interminable presentations on peak oil models.
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14 Sep 2007
My presentation to the IFG Teach In runs for 15 minutes and is divided into 3 sections. You can see them below. I think we ought to do a lot more sending DVDs of talks to conferences and staying at home. Perhaps we should see conferences as being more like the Oscars, a talk, a filmed greeting, some music, another film and another talk. Keep the media changing. Anyway, this is my attempt. If you were at the conference, did it work? Many thanks to Malcolm Baldwin for doing the filming, to Alex Munslow for putting it on YouTube and to Jerry Mander for being open to this experiment…
**Part One.**
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3B0zQ1pJAaY
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13 Sep 2007
Starting tomorrow in Washington is the International Forum on Globalisation’s **Teach-in: Confronting the Global Triple Crisis – Climate Change, Peak Oil, Global Resource Depletion & Extinction**, a wonderful event with an amazing array of speakers. Speakers include Megan Quinn, Maude Barlow, Richard Heinberg, Wes Jackson, Michael Klare, David Korten, Frances Moore Lappe, Bill McKibben and Vandana Shiva, to name but a few among 60. I was invited to speak, but having decided last year not to fly any more, I decided instead to film my talk and send it in the post, thereby saving 2,788 kgs of carbon by staying at home. I will post my presentation on YouTube tomorrow once the conference has started. If you are near Washington and can make it, it looks like a potentially life-changing event.
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Ray Leonard of the Kuwait Energy Company was the speaker who, for me, stole the show. He offered, prefaced with a few caveats, insights from within the oil industry, setting out how what the oil industry tells the public and what it actually thinks are very different. One got a sense from listening to Leonard of the degree of profound unease behind closed oil company doors, as year after year they have to downsize their declared reserves and find themselves less and less able to be optimistic.
