Elliot Fishman. Project Director and Report Editor
Phil Hart. Risk Management and Oil Industry Analyst
Joe Hurley. Workshop Facilitator and Urban Planning
1 Executive Summary
2. The Project – Maribyrnong City Council Peak Oil Contingency Plan
2.1 Introduction
2.2 Project Objective
2.3 Project Process
2.4 About this Report
3 Context – Peak Oil and Oil Vulnerability
3.1 Peak Oil
3.2 Responding to Peak Oil – Current Examples
3.3 Maribyrnong Council and Community Profile
4 The Process – Maribyrnong City Council Peak Oil Contingency Planning
4.1 Identifying Representative Service Areas
4.2 Workshop Scenarios
4.3 Risk Assessment Process
5 Representative Service Area Risk Profiles
6 Trigger Points
7 Themes and Recommendations
8 Conclusions
Appendix One – Condensed Recommendations
Appendix Two – Council Fuel Use
Appendix Three – Food Security
The Green Momentum Group and Bristol City
Council wish to thank:
• The peak oil taskforce for compiling the report: Simone Osborn (author), Dan Green,
Peter Lipman, Kate Hoare, Susan Warren, James Durie
• Inez Aponte for the future scenarios
• All the individuals and organisations who provided information or feedback for the
report
Part 1 –
Peak oil and its significance for Bristol
Part 2 –
1. Peak oil in Bristol
2. Cross sector implications
3. Transport and mobility
4. Food
5. Healthcare
6. Public services
7. Key economic sectors
8. Power and utilities
9. Summary
Part 3 –
Options for action
Key terms
Appendices –
1. An introduction to peak oil
2. Alternative fuels
3. UK natural gas, coal and electricity
4. Who else is considering the issue of peak oil
5. Portland, Oregon peak oil resolution
This report argues that governments have failed to acknowledge a looming oil supply crunch. Their collective failure means we have lost a decade in which action could have been taken. Recognition of the oil supply crunch would also have injected a sense of urgency and increased ambition into climate change negotiations.
Coal fuels about 50 percent of US electricity production and provides a quarter of the country’s total energy. China and India’s ferocious economic growth is based almost entirely on coal-generated electricity. Coal currently looks like a solution to many of our fast-growing energy problems. However, while coal advocates are urging full steam ahead, increasing reliance on the dirtiest of all fossil fuels has crucial implications for the global climate, energy policy, the world economy, and geopolitics.
Coal advocates argue that America has 250 years’ worth of coal. They say that although it’s disastrous stuff, coal is cheap and abundant, and so we should find a way to capture the carbon dioxide released from power plants. But what if the basic premise of that argument is wrong? What if coal isn’t as abundant as everyone thinks, and will be getting more expensive, and scarce, very soon? That’s the conclusion of a series of groundbreaking reports discussed in Blackout: Coal, Climate, and the Last Energy Crisis.
The book includes information from the National Academy of Science and the U.S. Geological Survey. Blackout goes to the heart of the tough energy questions that will dominate every sphere of public policy throughout the first half of this century, and is a must-read for planners, educators, and anyone concerned about energy consumption, peak oil and climate change.
Este libro tiene como origen el curso que, con el mismo título, se celebró en la Fundación César Manrique entre el 17 y el 19 de octubre de 2007, y que fue dirigido por los editores, Federico Aguilera y José Manuel Naredo.
La publicación incluye textos de Óscar Carpintero, Albert Recio, Manuel Delgado, Félix Arias y Marcos Roitman, además de los propios editores.
Tras los cánticos al libre mercado y al crecimiento de la producción, las operaciones de mera adquisición de riqueza están cada vez más al orden del día. Este libro da cuenta de ello a través de análisis generales y aplicados. Los primeros precisan el contexto sociopolítico en el que toma cuerpo la refundación oligárquica del poder en las actuales democracias, así como la cobertura ideológica que la hace pasar desapercibida. Los análisis aplicados se ilustran con casos en los que determinados personajes y grupos empresariales obtienen el lucro fácil e inmediato mediante «operaciones» inmobiliarias o financieras amparadas por el poder, utilizando como pretexto determinados megaproyectos de gran impacto territorial.
In response to the coming impact of peak oil, John Michael Greer helps us envision the transition from an industrial society to a sustainable ecotechnic world – not returning to the past, but creating a society that supports relatively advanced technology on a sustainable resource base.
Fusing human ecology and history, this book challenges assumptions held by mainstream and alternative thinkers about the evolution of human societies. Human societies, like ecosystems, evolve in complex and unpredictable ways, making it futile to try to impose rigid ideological forms on the patterns of evolutionary change. Instead, social change must explore many pathways over which we have no control. The troubling and exhilarating prospect of an open-ended future, he proposes, requires dissensus – a deliberate acceptance of radical diversity that widens the range of potential approaches to infinity.
Written in three parts, the book places the present crisis of the industrial world in its historical and ecological context in part one; part two explores the toolkit for Ecotechnic Age, and part three opens a door to the complexity of future visions.
This paper explores similarities and differences between the run‐up of oil prices in 2007‐08 and earlier oil price shocks, looking at what caused the price increase and what effects it had on the economy. Whereas historical oil price shocks were primarily caused by physical disruptions of supply, the price run‐up of 2007‐08 was caused by strong demand confronting stagnating world production. Although the causes were different, the consequences for the economy appear to have been very similar to those observed in earlier episodes, with significant effects on overall consumption spending and purchases of domestic automobiles in particular. In the absence of those declines, it is unlikely that we would have characterized the period 2007:Q4 to 2008:Q3 as one of economic recession for the U.S. The experience of 2007‐08 should thus be added to the list of recessions to which oil prices appear to have made a material contribution.
