A week ago, the American office of the international Association for the Study of Peak Oil (ASPO-USA) publicly challenged Cambridge Energy Research Associates (CERA) - a prominent oil forecasting think tank, to a wager: a bipartisan group of businessmen and analysts from ASPO offered up $100,000 to be paid if CERA’s 2017 oil production estimates are met. ASPO considers CERA’s forecasts wildly unrealistic at best and dangerously misguided at worst. They seek to challenge the analysis (and resulting policy decisions) that assume that even with steadily declining production from oil fields, worldwide oil production in ten years will continue to increase.  Read more »

WHAT’S A LOCAVORE TO DO IN DENVER?

Two years ago I helped organize (with ASPO-USA) a national Peak Oil conference in Denver that was attended by a healthy mix of local officials, big picture thinkers, petroleum industry reps, and environmental types. On the second day of the conference I moderated a panel discussion regarding local government response to Peak Oil scenarios. The debate centered on the question (made popular by James Howard Kunstler and others) of whether cities outside of strong agricultural zones (read: good soil, mild climate, plentiful water) will be viable in the future, or whether a serious decline in global petroleum supplies will significantly increase the cost of food transportation and require a new movement to rural living, thus signalling the demise of the city as we know it.

Whether or not you buy into the concept of a back to the land movement created by geopolitical crisis (also known as Relocalization), and many don’t, there is a strong and growing movement to support the production and consumption of local foods. Beyond Peak Oil scenarios, the Local Food Movement is being driven by a multitude of factors, including:  Read more »