Kunstler speech transcript

A transcript of a speech by James Howard Kunstler in Hudson, NY on 8 January 2005.

peakoil.com -> kunstler.com :

The global peak oil production event will change everything about how we live. It will challenge all of our assumptions. It will compel us to do things differently - whether we like it or not ...

Long before the oil actually depletes we will endure world-shaking political disturbances and economic disruptions. We will see globalism-in-reverse. Globalism was never an 'ism,' by the way. It was not a belief system. It was a manifestation of the 20-year-final-blowout of cheap oil. Like all economic distortions, it produced economic perversions. It allowed gigantic, predatory organisms like WalMart to spawn and reproduce at the expense of more cellular fine-grained economic communities ... the end of globalism will be hastened by international competition over the world's richest oil-producing regions ...

[Click here for the rest of the transcript] - a must read!

(2005-01-28 21:08:45 SGT) [Energy] Permalink Comments [2]

Neocons turning green

peakoil.com -> slate.msn.com :

Suddenly, neoconservatives - for instance, the guys behind the invasion of Iraq at the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) - are turning Green. The reason, amazingly enough, is that dependence on petroleum puts money in the hands of middle eastern theocrats bearing grudges against the West. Robert Bryce reports in Slate :

... a curious transformation is occurring in Washington, D.C., a split of foreign policy and energy policy: Many of the leading neoconservatives who pushed hard for the Iraq war are going green. James Woolsey, the former director of the Central Intelligence Agency and staunch backer of the Iraq war, now drives a 58-miles-per-gallon Toyota Prius and has two more hybrid vehicles on order. Frank Gaffney, the president of the Center for Security Policy and another neocon who championed the war, has been speaking regularly in Washington about fuel efficiency and plant-based bio-fuels.

The alliance of hawks and environmentalists is new but not entirely surprising. The environmentalists are worried about global warming and air pollution. But Woolsey and Gaffney - both members of the Project for the New American Century, which began advocating military action against Saddam Hussein back in 1998 - are going green for geopolitical reasons, not environmental ones. They seek to reduce the flow of American dollars to oil-rich Islamic theocracies, Saudi Arabia in particular. Petrodollars have made Saudi Arabia too rich a source of terrorist funding and Islamic radicals ...

... for Woolsey and Gaffney, the fact that energy efficiency and conservation might help the environment is an unintended side benefit. They want to weaken the Saudis, the Iranians, and the Syrians while also strengthening the Israelis. Whether these ends are achieved with M-16s or hybrid automobiles doesn't seem to matter to them.

... if they can convince Congress and the White House to enact meaningful legislation on energy efficiency and conservation—issues that have been marginalized since the Carter administration—then perhaps the neocons will finally have a success story that they can brag about. Better still, it won't require the services of the 82nd Airborne Division.

(2005-01-28 07:25:51 SGT) [Energy] Permalink

Alarm At New Climate Warning

rense.com -> bbc.co.uk

Global temperatures could rise by as much as eleven degrees Celsius, according to one of the largest climate prediction projects ever run. This figure is twice the level that previous studies have suggested. The scientists behind the project, called climateprediction.net, say it shows there's no such thing as a safe level of carbon dioxide. The results of the study, which used PCs around the world to produce data, are published in the journal Nature.

Climateprediction.net is run from Oxford University, and is a distributed computing project; rather than using a supercomputer to run climate models, people can download software to their own PCs, which run the programs during downtime. More than 95,000 people have registered, from more than 150 countries; their PCs have between them run more than 60,000 simulations of future climate.

... on Monday, the International Climate Change Taskforce, co-chaired by the British MP Stephen Byers, claimed it had shown that a carbon dioxide concentration of over 400 ppm (parts per million) would be 'dangerous'. The current concentration is around 378 ppm, rising at roughly 2ppm per year.

Distributed computing has been used before, notably by the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence or Seti, where several million people have downloaded software enabling them to analyse data from observations of distant galaxies for signs of alien life. The scientists behind climateprediction.net believe their project, because it is distributed to individual PCs, can help inform people about climate change - and that, in turn could bring political change.