Local Solutions to the Energy Dilemma conference
April 27-29, 2006
A Peak Oil Conference for New York City
Morning and Afternoon Wrapup
The Interloafer, The Oil Drum / NYC
...The Local Solutions to the Energy Dilemma conference kicked off today at the Community Church of New York, a Unitarian-Universalist church on East 35th Street in the Murray Hill section of Manhattan. The grand cavernous space of the church's brick interior provided a welcome contrast to the traffic-clogged crosstown route outside, where many lanes of drivers jostle for position, allowing an occasional horn-blare to be heard within the sanctuary.
There were ample audio and video recordings being made, so I am looking forward to seeing those sounds and images being made available online, hopefully in the coming days. It was a pleasure to welcome people from all around the country and world (Vermont and Australia were well represented) into New York City.
Topics covered this morning and afternoon included overviews of the Peak Oil concept, the geopolitical consequendces of America's addiction to oil, sustainable local food production or permaculture, and energy efficient transportation and housing.
The most memorable statistic that sticks in my mind comes from Charles Komanoff's presentation advocating for a carbon tax: Americans put forth as much carbon dioxide in a day as everyone else on the planet puts out in a week. Ouch.
(27 April 2006)
Quick Update from NYC Local Solutions Conference
baloghblog, The Oil Drum / NYC
Well after 12 hours of steady information from the Local Solutions Conference in NYC - I have a full legal pad of notes, and a full head of ideas. Blogging those ideas will take more than a night, but I wanted to give a quick long update for those that were interested in the conference, but were unable to attend.
Leonard Rothberg kicked off the conference, telling us with his initial brush with peak oil and a 1976 interview with King Hubbert, and an article called "Bottom of the Barrel Published in the village voice. Even back then Leonard was pushing for southern wall space solar H2O heating and PV panels, garbage conversion to energy and more recently the use of NYC's 584 mi of coastline for wind power generation.
Michael Klare was up next. He is the author of - Blood and Oil: The Dangers and Consequences of America's Growing Dependency on Imported Petroleum. He believed that we are at the "hump" of peak oil and that alt energies will only cause a stretching out of the hump over a period of several decades. This will bring us an increased risk of further conflict, and opportunity for environmental disaster. He feels that the US has already made the decision to start a conflict in IRAN, and bombs will fall prior to the Nov elections. (An interesting fact that Dr. Klare brought up was that the subsidies that the US govt provides to oil companies are mainly for offseting the cost of exploration and development for deep water drilling in the Gulf of Mexico.) His suggestion for solutions to the diminishing amount of cheap oil is that the American Public needs to be persuaded that addiction to oil is unpatriotic and immoral. He states that the people that read TOD and attend the peak oil conferences can be convinced of peak oil's existence through logic and science, but the vast majority of the public must be reached through morality and conscience.
(27 April 2006)
NYC Energy Solutions: Thursday afternoon
Yankee, The Oil Drum /NYC
...I was only able to attend the afternoon sessions of the meeting, but I'll take up where Baloghblog left off in the previous post.
The first session I attended was on energy-efficient transportation, featuring Aaron Naparstek, Charlie Komanoff, Paul Steely White, and George Haikalis. All of them are involved in trying to make New York City more efficient for bikes and pedestrians, and less auto-oriented. As NYC residents know, we have a unique opportunity to drastically reduce the amount of car traffic in New York City, precisely because there are already so many other transit options available. The speakers presented several ideas for reducing car traffic in NYC, including congestion pricing, reducing the amount of garage space in the central business district, disallowing privileged on street (and sidewalk!) parking for police and diplomats, and making train-to-subway access less difficult. These speakers are also bicycle activists who are working hard to get more buffered bike lanes around the city so that biking is also a real commuting option.
Charlie Komanoff added a new angle to the panel by discussing the cost of CO2 emissions. He noted that in the past, efforts to reduce carbon emissions have been ineffective, since they ended up gaming the system (CAFE), being circuitous (renewable energy credits), or diluting the real goal (incentives for hybrids). Komanoff advocates a significant gas tax, to be phased in over a relatively long period, and which would include either a rebate of approximately $1400/yr to taxpayers or a shift out of regressive taxes while the populace is still transitioning to a lifestyle with gasoline at $6 or $7 a gallon.
After the transportation session was a session on permaculture. The first two speakers Andrew Jones and Andrew Philips mostly just described what permaculture is, and talked about their own backgrounds in getting interested in it. The last speaker, Keith Morris discussed some ways that New York City residents might start getting involved in permaculture, like advocating for green roofs, and agriculture in parks and empty lots.
(28 April 2006)
The Paradigm is the Enemy: The State of the Peak Oil Movement at the Cusp of Collapse
Michael C. Ruppert, From the Wilderness
fromthewilderness.com
A Speech for the Local Solutions to the Energy Dilemma Conference
April 27-29, New York City, at Cooper Union
[This is the most important speech of my life. If you read anything I’ve written this year, read this - MCR]
April 28, 2006 1630 PST - (FTW) - NEW YORK - As a matter of necessity, in the course of a turbulent and often very difficult life, I have developed a pretty warped sense of humor. As most police officers, nurses, ER doctors, paramedics, and military combat veterans know, the best time to find humor is when things are at their worst. Sometimes the humor that emerges from these situations is strange, to say the least. And yet sometimes it remains the most memorable humor of a lifetime-humor that can actually sustain you in tough times. Humor is energy.
Too often Peak Oil activism reminds me of a statement that I found a long time ago in a book of famous quotations. In the section containing the last recorded words of famous people I found a quote that has stayed with me ever since.
The quote was simply, “We’ve got them now.”
The person who wrote those last “recorded” words on a dispatch to his commanding officer, General George Crook, was George Armstrong Custer.
During the course of this conference I have heard precious little attention paid to events in the world around us indicating that Peak Oil is about to have its global “coming out party” and what that might mean. In almost every nook, cranny and corner of the planet, stress points are beginning to fracture.
(28 April 2006)
Published on 30 Apr 2006 by Energy Bulletin. Archived on 30 Apr 2006.
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