I’ve been writing about the implications of Peak Oil here for a number of years. (If you’re a new reader, Peak Oil is the idea that eventually we will have accessed all the cheap oil that remains in the ground, there will still be additional oil, but the prices will rise.) I’ve been particularly concerned about the effect that a steep rise in energy prices would have on the life of a local congregation. Over […]
Bikes are becoming more popular - is this something congregations need to think about?
The amount of oil produced world-wide has not increased significantly since 2005. Sure we’ve found major new reserves, but they’re harder to access and more expensive to produce. The cheap oil of that drove the hyper-progress of the 20th century is gone. Get ready. It’s gonna get bumpy. We are entering an era in which we are effectively going through a economic phase change. In physics, when we move through a phase change, physical characteristics […]
I’ve been worried about this for sometime now. What happens when the suburban lifestyle begins to be no longer sustainable because of energy costs? Well for one thing, the real estate industry will collapse. The New York Times has an article this weekend that locates the proximate cause of the Great Recession in the growing re-urbanization trend: “It was predominantly the collapse of the car-dependent suburban fringe that caused the mortgage collapse. In the late […]
Here’s an interesting idea. Apparently there’s a company in the US that is about to release a small power generating device capable of providing up to 250 megawatts of power in a 500 pound unit small enough to fit in the engine compartment of a car. The device uses Thorium, a relatively common rare-earth element. The US leads the world in thorium reserves. “The key to the system developed by inventor Charles Stevens, CEO and […]
So, the rumors that the Saudi’s were claiming that they had much more oil than they really have are apparently begin corroborated by the State Department according to Wiki Leaks. CNN reports: “(CNN) — Saudi Arabia’s oil reserves may have been grossly overestimated and its capacity to continue pumping at current capacity exaggerated, according to a U.S. diplomatic cable sent from the kingdom in 2007. The cable, obtained by WikiLeaks and published in the British […]
In the hopes that I’ll actually follow through with some plans I have if I go public with them, I thought I’d post some of the areas I’m planning on focusing my reading and studies on in the coming year. For those of you who hear me preach, consider this fair warning… Atonement: I’ve been thinking a great deal about Brian McLaren’s idea that the classic Anselmian version of the Atonement no longer makes sense […]
There’s a pretty somber essay posted this week about the world’s future in post-oil economy. What makes it particularly somber is that it starts with the observation that Peak Oil occurred about 5 years ago (when all the data shows a peak in global oil production): [N]ow does seem to be an auspicious moment to hold forth with a new piece of Peak Oil theory, because this is the year when, for the first time, […]
The New York Time has a report on news that appears in Der Speigel. It exposes a report made to a branch of the Bundeswehr (the German Army): “The study states that there is ‘some probability that peak oil will occur around the year 2010 and that the impact on security is expected to be felt 15 to 30 years later.’ […]The German military study, which was analyzed and partly translated into English by Der […]
There have been a number of papers recently which have suggested that amazing efficiency of the photosynthesis stems from its exploitation of quantum entanglement in the conversion from light to energy. Now some investigations into the details of the mechanism are beginning to give us a hint about how to move forward exploiting that knowledge to be build much more efficient solar cells: “In a paper in The Journal of Chemical Physics, which is published […]
