Posts tagged as "energy_crisis" - Chris Hardie

I've talked about oil prices and peak oil here in the past (on several occasions, really). You may remember that we had a panel of experts here in November to provide an outlook on the economic health of the area, and one of them said that as long as the price of oil doesn't reach $70/barrel, we'll be okay. Hmm - at the end of the week the price went up to $75 a barrel, a record and people are paying US$4/gallon in some areas. And - oh my - they're actually noticing. Perhaps its just an "Earth...

One can't help but notice a headline like that: "Humans spur worst extinctions since dinosaurs" - it might even bring one out of a blogging hiatus. You can read the full U.N. report in various languages, but the summary is that, "[i]n effect, we are currently responsible for the sixth major extinction event in the history of earth." We? Who, me? Wowsers. Considering how brief a time humans have been around in that earth history, we should be pretty proud of ourselves to make such a blip on the ole'...

Last weekend I had the opportunity to head to Crawfordsville for the first session of the Indiana Energy Conference, a series of film showings, discussions, and presentations designed to help us explore our culture's relationship with energy. The conference was organized by my friend Frank Cicela, who has been a long time participant in the IshCon conferences I've been involved in putting on since 1999, and he and I have collaborated on a few other projects as well. The IEC comes out of our trip...

Last Monday I had the opportunity to attend the Indiana University Kelley School of Business's "Business Outlook Panel" during their luncheon stop in Richmond to provide a forecast of the national, state-wide and local economies for 2006. Sponsored by Bank One (er, Chase Bank) and Richmond Baking and well attended, it was an interesting event all around: For one, it was attended by 17 young adults from the "Young Adult Professionals" group that's been growing here in town (and with which I'm now involved)....

Well, in case you hadn't noticed, it's taking me a while longer than I'd thought it would to synthesize my notes from the Peak Oil conference into blog postings. In the interest of getting them done and published at all, this entry will be much less detailed than my others, and hopefully you can check out the DVD of the conference (not yet available) if you want to learn more. You can start with my introduction if you're just joining us. The morning was devoted to the theme of "Creating Alternative...

This post summarizes the events of the second part of the second day of the Second U.S. Conference on Peak Oil and Community Solutions. You can read my introduction, my summary from Friday, and my summary from Saturday morning. After lunch we gathered again to hear from Jan Lundberg, a former analyst for the petroleum industry (he published the well known Lundberg Letter, the so-called "bible of the oil industry") and now founder and editor of the Culture Change newsletter and website. His...

This post summarizes the events of the first part of the second day of the Second U.S. Conference on Peak Oil and Community Solutions. You can read my introduction and my summary from the first day. As you'll note, there's quite a lot there, I hope it's not too discombobulated to be useful. I should note that the conference organizers are planning to produce a DVD of the various sessions held here, so if you're at all interested in seeing some of this stuff for yourself (and without my filters/bias),...

My friend Frank arrived in Richmond this morning to form the beginning of our small caravan to the Second U.S. Conference on Peak Oil and Community Solutions, as I mentioned yesterday. After some brief touring around town, a visit to Summersault, and showing off some of the great local stuff Richmond has to offer, we headed east to pick Dayna up at the airport. From there we headed to Yellow Springs, Ohio and the campus of Antioch College, where the conference is being held. You can check out some...

I have the privilege to be headed to the second U.S. conference on "Peak Oil and Community Solutions" this weekend in Ohio. I've mentioned Peak Oil here before, and so I'm excited to be joining some folks who I already know think about this stuff on a trip to meet new people and explore this "issue" further. It seems to come at an especially relevant time, where energy concerns and oil production are tied in to most every headline, public policy decision, financial planning fear - even weather...

I was going to write something about the impact of hurricane Katrina - on our collective consciousness, the "energy crisis", politics, humanity's relationship to nature and the land, comparisons to 9/11, and so on. Then I read Dave Pollard's article, "Do Events Like Katrina and 9/11 Make Us Crazy?" and he got most of my key points in there, so now all I really feel motivated to say is, "uhhh, what he said." Thanks, Dave. (But don't forget to find your sanity again - there's lots to be done.)