Peak Oil Round-up

It’s been ages, once again, since I wrote for this site. I am in the process of finding a group of amazing sustainable Spokane women to share more frequent entries with me. But in the meantime, some quick updates. The co-housing (loose-knit intentional community) is gathering steam. The PUD was approved by the City a few weeks ago and anyone interested in more information can email me at juliet@outtheremonthy.com. I will also try to continue to write about it.

Perusing my usual peak oil websites; the tone seems to be more urgent. I came across a couple of articles tied to food production in post-peak years and one discussing the potential (from Matthew Simmons) that we may have already peaked. The links are below.

There seems to be this ongoing debate as to whether the highly urbanized cities are really the best places to be during a potential peak oil collapse. Chicago, New York, etc. are heavily energy dependent with very little immediate food production. The Ethan Genauer piece says in a dwindling oil supply situation, “35 million Americans and 2 billion people worldwide will suffer chronic hunger,” and 2 million in New York City, where there is very little arable land for food production.

The Gwynne Dyer piece describes the impact of cheap energy on our food production by stating, “The miracle that has fed us for a whole generation now was the Green Revolution: higher-yielding crops that enabled us to almost triple world food production between 1950 and 1990 while increasing the area of farmland by no more than ten percent.”

Here in Spokane, we have Community-Minded Enterprises starting a community garden campaign. Please see our new Go Green Directory for a complete article on this and how to get involved. The community garden idea is fantastic, it builds community while also feeding folks. I would love to see shared urban gardens springing up all over Spokane.

Oh, and more cheery news from James Howard Kunstler (if he didn’t have such a great sense of very-dry humor, he would drive me crazy) fears that a President Obama would be assassinated. Go to http://jameshowardkunstler.typepad.com/clusterfuck_nation/2006/10/enter_barack_ob.html for the full story.

Here are the food articles and peak oil comments:

http://www.energybulletin.net/21736.html

http://www.energybulletin.net/18521.html

http://www.energybulletin.net/21696.html