The Oil Drum

George Kenney over at Electric Politics has quite the interview with Al Bartlett. Here's a link to the .mp3 download, and here's a link to the post itself, which has an in-line player and comments. George writes:

It's an enormous conceit to think that population increases are everywhere and always a good thing. In the blessed tradition, however, of neo-classical economic theory (aka 'free markets') such is the miracle of rational choice that left to themselves people will 'optimize' the rate of population growth: no natural limit on population exists. Nevertheless, in reality the unacknowledged costs of population growth mostly shift to future generations. Call it the ultimate Ponzi scheme. And if you think about it, population growth is the main driver of all our planetary scale problems, from warming to Peak Oil to food production, right down the list. Locally as well, even to diluted democratic practices of governance. Although it makes no sense whatsoever to tackle any of these without due consideration of the population factor most of the time population doesn't get mentioned — the implications are so politically controversial. To help put population and its derivatives into perspective I turned to a man who's been sounding the alarm about sustainability for decades, Dr. Albert Allen Bartlett. It was a real privilege to talk with Al, who's as close to being a prophet as anybody can be these days. Listen, and pass the word! Total runtime an hour and sixteen minutes.

Amen, brother. (Feel free to link to other recent peak oil media in the comments as well.)

This is a guest post by John Feeney, Ph.D. Trained as a psychologist, John is today an environmental writer and activist in Boulder, Colorado. He began investigating environmental issues while fighting destructive residential development in a small Iowa town where he and his family lived for two years. His research pointed inevitably to the interacting roles played by population growth, the drive for economic growth, and our reliance on fossil energy in fueling the ecological crisis we now face. His website is called Growth Is Madness.

Some of us who examine and discuss environmental matters are constantly puzzled and frustrated by the seeming inability of elected officials, environmental organizations, and environmental and political writers to “get” the nature of our ecological plight. Could it be they’re simply unaware of the ecological principles which enable one to understand it?

This is a guest post by Chris Clugston. Chris has spent over 30 years working with information technology sector companies in marketing, sales, finance, M&A, and general management—the last twenty as a corporate chief executive and management consultant. Chris received an AB/Political Science, Magna Cum Laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Penn State University, and an MBA/Finance with High Distinction from Temple University in Philadelphia, PA.

Energy is the “enabling” resource; most, if not all other natural and manmade resources and their capacities to sustain human life are derived from or dependent upon one or more sources of primary energy. The fact that the amount of energy available to human beings is subject to a limit—global peak energy—has profound implications for future human population levels and living standards.

Given humanity’s unquestioned dependence upon energy for survival, answers to the following questions are critical to our long term success as a species:

• When and at what level will global energy “peak”?
• What are the implications of global peak energy for the world’s human population?

The following analysis represents my initial attempt to answer these questions; the primary conclusions are unsettling, but clear: Based on publicly available data, global peak energy will probably occur between the years 2025 and 2030; total available energy will decline continuously thereafter.