The Peakist

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…)

It’s interesting to note in the light of George Monbiot’s polemic that the Observer ‘Energy’ special report, headlined with ‘Earth at the tipping point’ was sponsored by Shell advertising, with www.shellspringboard.org offering funding to small businesses for ‘ideas that combat climate change’. Monbiot’s line “BP and Shell are to Exxon what New Labour is to the old Tories” is apposite. Interesting to see also, two pages before the Monbiot piece “Oil Price likely to fall, says [BP CEO] Browne”

“It is very likely that, in the medium term, prices will stand at about $40 on average. In the very long run, even $25 to $30 are possible,” he said in an interview with the German weekly news magazine Der Spiegel.

Lord Browne accepted that it was unlikely prices would fall sharply in the short term but dismissed notions that the price could only go up as scarcity increased. Large oilfields were still being found, he said, and regions such as west Africa had more hydrocarbons that could be tapped.

He also noted that Canada’s oil sands could also be exploited profitably. Even though they were expensive to bring out of the ground, production costs remained well below world selling prices for crude.”

What are we to make of such optimism - perhaps little given BP’s role in maintaining the fiction of global oil abundance through the Statistical Review. “Chaos ahead, says Brown” would be unlikely to calm investors. But this is hardly ‘Beyond Petroleum’ is it?

And more to the point perhaps someone should tell Brown that the economic viability of tar sand production lies in $50 a barrel and up range, which is why Chavez is pushing OPEC to set this as a minimum barrell price should prices start falling. You can’t have it both ways, you’ve either got $25 a barrel crude or you’ve viable tar sand production and an investment climate open to deep sea exploration.

The mainstream media’s treatment of the peak oil issue amazes me. The ability, to see how dependent all aspects of our social structure are on cheap oil, and how the declining supply of that oil will directly lead to a decline in our social structures is staggering. It will not be a case of getting the train to work instead of your car. The practical reality is, a significant amount of our jobs won’t exist in the post carbon world. (more…)

ST. LOUIS — The search for El Dorado in the Amazonian rainforest might not have yielded pots of gold, but it has led to unearthing a different type of gold mine: some of the globe’s richest soil that can transform poor soil into highly fertile ground.That’s not all. Scientists have a method to reproduce this soil — known as terra preta, or Amazonian dark earths — and say it can pull substantial amounts of carbon out of the increasing levels of carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere, helping to prevent global warming. That’s because terra preta is loaded with so-called bio-char — similar to charcoal.

“The knowledge that we can gain from studying the Amazonian dark earths, found throughout the Amazon River region, not only teaches us how to restore degraded soils, triple crop yields and support a wide array of crops in regions with agriculturally poor soils, but also can lead to technologies to sequester carbon in soil and prevent critical changes in world climate,” said Johannes Lehmann, assistant professor of biogeochemistry in the Department of Crop and Soil Sciences at Cornell University, speaking today (Feb. 18) at the 2006 meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. (more…)

When people hear the word “agriculture,” most think of food. But the benefits of agriculture are much more than farm fresh corn or dairy products. Now scientists are investigating how farmers can manage their land to offer everyone more environmental benefits, and whether farmers could be paid for providing these benefits.

“Agriculture, which includes planted forests, is the world’s largest human-managed ecosystem,” said Scott Swinton, professor of agricultural economics at Michigan State University. “There is a huge area of land that people manage for food, fiber and fuel – these are all marketed products with a value attached to them. What we want to know is if we can also manage agriculture for things that people like and appreciate, but don’t have markets, such as cleaner air, cleaner water, less global warming, wildlife habitat and aesthetics – many people enjoy seeing the green, open space of farmland in their communities.” (more…)

In what is possibly the largest-ever analysis of sustainable agriculture practices in developing countries, scientists working in Bangkok, Beijing, Mexico, Sri Lanka, and the U.K. conclude that these techniques improve farmers’ lives by increasing crop yields and preserving the local environment. According to a paper published in this issue of ES&T (pp 1114–1119), poor farmers increased their crop yields by an average of 79% by using techniques such as crop rotation, organic farming, and genetically modified seeds.

Sustainable agriculture practices used by the poor, like this vegetable farmer in southwestern Cambodia, can increase yields by 71%, new research shows.

“It’s an exciting report,” Dennis Keeney, emeritus professor at Iowa State University and founding director of the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture, tells ES&T, especially the tables that summarize data from all 57 countries. “You can go right to it and get information without having to run all over the world,” he adds. (more…)