Peak Oil News

Whenever the price of gas rises, North Americans begin to talk about driving less. Recent oil price trends have seen a noticeable reduction in SUV sales and have hit the large automobile manufacturers hard. Middle class America has been hit hardest by the rising cost of living; higher taxes and mortgages, car payments and the rising price of home and vehicle energy. Large suburban homes require large amounts of heat, electricity (for lighting) and air conditioning. Most households have two or more full-sized cars which are used to travel far distances for education and employment. All of these factors ...

As the global population problem increases, serious problems seem likely to occur. All sectors of the economy will experience price increase and demand due to resource shortages. Overcrowding brings out the worst in people, as we have seen thanks to the "road rage" phenomenon. Add to these stresses looming climate change challenges and energy supply crisis and we seem doomed for disaster. The current social situation in America doesn't leave much hope for a co-operative solution to the population issue. More innovative program initiatives at the governmental level are needed. » Source: Augusta Free Press Sometime during October, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, America will add its 300 millionth resident. While profiling the candidate may be a quirky exercise in fiction writing - it will ...

Back in the early 20th Century, when the cheap oil fiesta was just getting underway, and some major new technological innovation made its debut every month – cars, radio, movies, airplanes – there was no practical limit to what men of vision could imagine about the future city, though often their imaginings were ridiculous. The representative case is Le Corbusier (Charles-Edouard Jeanneret; 1887 – 1965), the leading architectural hoodoo-meister of Early High Modernism, whose 1925 Plan Voisin for Paris proposed to knock down the entire Marais district on the Right Bank and replace it with rows of identical towers set between freeways. » Source: James Howard Kunstler Luckily for Paris, the city officials laughed at him every time he came back with the scheme over the next forty years – and Corb was nothing if not a relentless self-promoter. ...

Julian Darley: The message is getting out. More and more people have noticed there's a problem with petroleum and gas. And now, peak oil is spoken - even within the corridors of power. Even though sometimes it's to deny it. But, not always, by any means. So, I think it very interesting to hear about your experiences with the kinds of people, who actually do build some of the infrastructure that we need to change. » Source: Global Public Media James Howard Kunstler: I've been associated with the New Urbanists, for about 15 years. And, they're mostly the designers and developers I consult with. And, they've done a tremendous amount of very good work around the country. Most of the best work that they do, is this stuff that they're least known for. They're best known for ...

Urbanization is one of the dominant demographic trends of our time. In 1900, 150 million people lived in cities. By 2000, it was 2.9 billion people, a 19-fold increase. By 2007 more than half of us will live in cities—making us, for the first time, an urban species. In 1900 there were only a handful of cities with a million people. Today 408 cities have at least that many inhabitants. And there are 20 megacities with 10 million or more residents. Tokyo’s population of 35 million exceeds that of Canada. Mexico City’s population of 19 million is nearly equal to that of Australia. New York, São Paulo, Mumbai (formerly Bombay), Delhi, Calcutta, Buenos Aires, and Shanghai follow close behind. » Source: Earth Policy Institute Cities require a concentration of food, water, energy, and materials that nature cannot provide. Concentrating these masses of materials and ...

For decades, the conventional wisdom about developing energy projects in the U.S. has been that "big" always meant cheaper, and therefore better, projects. This produced what has become our modern centralized electric power system fueled primarily by coal, natural gas and nuclear power. In the mid-to late 1990s, however, the electric power industry began to hear concerns, particularly from the environmental community, about the negative environmental consequences of a system based too heavily on these types of power. As a result, a second wave of thinking arose that called not just for producing the cheapest power at any cost, but also for finding ways to produce cleaner energy from renewable sources such as the wind, sun, biomass, water and geothermal heat -- and to do so on a scale large enough to become a significant portion of utilities energy portfolios. » Source: ...