The Peakist

By TODD LEWAN, Associated Press/MIAMI .Some facts about America’s trade embargo with Cuba: It’s been U.S. policy since 1961. It has yet to loosen Fidel Castro’s grip on power.  It has cost America little strategically or economically. Until now, that is.

From here on out, say a growing chorus of experts, America will pay a price for maintaining its 45-year trade ban with the communist nation — a strategic and economic price that will have negative repercussions for the United States in the decades to come.

What has changed the equation? Oil. (more…)

Richard Heinberg writes: There is considerable danger that the smoke and fire from these three geographic flashpoints—Iraq, Iran, and Lebanon—could converge in a larger regional conflagration. In light of all this potential for apocalyptic mayhem, a discussion of the oil business may seem almost frivolous. But it is important to remember that, historically, the drawing of borders in the Middle East; the establishment of British, French, and later US-backed puppet governments in these faux nations; and the rise of a radical Islamic fundamentalist movement to challenge the Western-backed regimes, have all been fueled by the wealth produced by oil, and by the need for oil on the part of importing countries.

For decades there was a petroleum status quo of sorts in the Middle East: the capacity for production exceeded demand, and OPEC worked to restrain exports in order to keep prices from collapsing; meanwhile big producers like Saudi Arabia served as the world’s petroleum bankers, maintaining the solvency of the system. On only one occasion—the embargo of 1973-74—did the swing producers withhold needed oil flows for political reasons, or cause prices to reach levels unacceptable to consumers (the other major post-1970 oil shocks, due to wars or revolutions, were beyond OPEC’s control).

Now the status quo is crumbling—not so much for political reasons (though those are certainly imaginable, given the situations outlined above), but for reasons of geology. (more…)

Nuclear energy is currently the forerunner in the race to help the UK get over the coming energy gap and while it is a undisputed contendor it is not the silver bullet EDF, the Nuclear lobbists and New Labour would have us believe.

Safety is simply the overiding  issue, no matter what pro nuclear campaigners say about new the generation of reactors there is always a risk.

“BNG’s Thorp spent fuel reprocessing facility at Sellafield is still closed after the leak of radioactive liquid in May 2005, involving enough material to half fill an Olympic-sized swimming pool. BNG was prosecuted separately over the incident by the Health and Safety Executive in June and is due to be fined in October. “

“At the UKAEA’s Dounreay facility in Scotland last September, 266 litres of hazardous nuclear waste split on to a laboratory floor when it was being mixed with concrete and pumped into 500-litre drums for storage.”

source: Independent Michael Harrison

Essentially technology breaksdown and when a wind farm or a tidal turbine breakdown they do not endanger the immediate area with being a possible radiation hotzone.  There is no arguement against this.  If you don’t believe its a health hazard why not buy a holiday property in chernobyl? I believe you’ll find some outstanding value.
There is still the outstanding issue of £70 Billion pounds worth of nuclear waste still without a home.  Thats 470,000 cubic metres of nuclear waste - enough to fill the Albert Hall five times.  Should we sort this first before creating more

Thirdly the contract up for tender are already name checked for EDF its french subsideries.  This is a huge amount of tax payers money simply leaving the UK.  For a country that so vehmently refused to give up the pound it seems staggering we’d hand our future energy dependancy to a foreign state to develop.

With the annoucement yesterday that Fidel Castro is handing power over to his brother, due to ill health, this is perhaps a good time to have a look at how Cuba coped with it’s own artificially enforced version of peak oil. When the Soviet Union collapsed, and with it Cuba’s supply of subsidised oil, Cube underwent an profound oil crisis that can provide some interesting lessons on how we might cope with the reality of peak oil. Today Hugo Chavez is supplying Cuba with oil and it would be interesting to know to what extent things have changed back to oil dependency.

Perhaps the most profound change caused by the Cuban oil crisis was the forced areplacement of centralised, industrial monocultural agriculture with a revolution in permaculture. The following piece, which first appeared in Permaculture Activist, Spring 2006 (www.permacultureactivist.net) was written by Megan Quinn, outreach director for The Community Solution ( www.communitysolution.org). (more…)