The November Meetup is now going on a field trip to:

TAR SANDS: THE DARK SIDE OF THE BOOM
BC Wide Speaking Tour on the Impacts of the Tar Sands on Communities in Alberta and BC.

Vancouver - Tuesday, November 25th
Heritage Hall
3102 Main St.
Vancouver, BC
Event to start 7 pm

Speakers on the Panel include:

>> MIKE MERCREDI - Member of the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation will be speaking about the front line struggles of the indigenous community in Fort Chipewyan against the tar sands industry, including a plague of tar sands related cancer.

>> JESSIE KALMAN - Tar Sands Campaigner with the Polaris Institute will speak on the social & environmental impacts of the tar sands.

>> WILL HORTER - Executive Director of Dogwood Initiative will speak about the little known support that infrastructure based and proposed in BC provides to current and future tar-sands development. (Speaking in Vancouver, Victoria, Comox and Nanaimo)

Please join us for a very important panel about the largest industrial project in history that has been devastating the environment and communities in Alberta and is now extending to communities within BC.

This Tour is being organized, endorsed and supported by the Council of Canadians, the Polaris Institute, Canadian Union of Public Employees BC, the Seirra Club, the Dogwood Initiative, Greenpeace, Check-Your Head, Institute for Citizen Journalism, Tar Sands Free BC, North Coast Enviro Watch, Western Wilderness Committee.

The organizers of the Vancouver Peak Oil Group apologize for this late diversion, however we could not, in good faith, hold a meetup at the same time as this important event. Thank you for your cooperation.

-Neil Westlake

Room 7000 (Earl and Jennie Lohn Policy Room)

“We are an exceptional model of the human race. We no longer know how to produce food. We no longer can heal ourselves. We no longer raise our young. We have forgotten the names of the stars, fail to notice the phases of the moon. We do not know the plants and they no longer protect us. We tell ourselves we are the most powerful specimens of our kind who have ever lived. But when the lights are off we are helpless. We cannot move without traffic signals. We must attend classes in order to learn by rote numbered steps toward love or how to breast-feed our baby. We justify anything, anything at all by the need to maintain our way of life. And then we go to the doctor and tell the professionals we have no life. We have a simple test for making decisions: our way of life, which we cleverly call our standard of living, must not change except to grow yet more grand. We have a simple reality we live with each and every day: our way of life is killing us.”

published Feb. 2002

By Rick Balfour, VPO

Plan B Questions are mandatory for all civic, provincial and federal politiicans.

Poor answers or no answers deserve no votes; we need leaders with both guts and vision.

We need action, not more talk. We have little time to change.

1. How high is your own concsciousness, relative to Global run away impacts on our communities, about Peak Oil, Global Warming and the inevitable shift in job markets and mass migration from difficult areas to highly preferred areas. Is it higher than most, are you ahead enough in the issues to lead and be proactive?

Take a page or ten minutes. No excuses, no glib answers.
Read the complete Post.

During an interview with Thomas Friedman David Letterman launched into a rant about global warming and the lack of leadership needed to take action. Funny and earnest.

“We are dead meat,” said David Letterman last night in the midst of a lengthy rant on global warming. He blamed a lack of leadership over the last several decades. He also said he didn’t think that little steps like reusing party toothpicks or turning lawn clippings into mulch could possibly help.”

WATCH the clip: David Letterman on Huffington Post

Commodity Online
2008-08-20 17:50:00
By Rex Weyler
Original article

As the era of cheap liquid fuels draws to an end, everything about modern consumer society will change. Likewise, developing societies pursuing the benefits of globalization will struggle to grow economies in an era of scarce liquid fuels. The most localized, self-reliant communities will experience the least disruption.

Oil is a fixed asset of the planet, representing stored sunlight accumulated over a billion years as early marine algae, and other marine organisms (not dinosaurs) captured solar energy, formed carbon bonds, gathered nutrients, died, sank to the ocean floors, and lay buried under eons of sediment. Like any fixed non-renewable resource, oil is limited, and its consumption will rise, peak, and decline.

World oil production increased for 150 years until the spring of 2005, when world crude oil production reached about 74.3 million barrels per day (mb/d), and total liquid fuels, including tar sands, liquefied gas, and biofuels reached about 85 mb/d. In spite of the efforts since, and tales of “trillions of barrels” of oil in undiscovered fields, liquid fuel production has remained at about 85.5 mb/d for three years, the longest sustained plateau in modern petroleum history. Discoveries of new fields peaked 40 years ago. Read the complete Post.

The Vancouverpeakoil.org panel discussion from July 12th is now available for download, courtest of Alex Smith at Radio Ecoshock.

The CD quality version (56 MB) is at:
http://www.ecoshock.net/eshock08/ES_080829_Show.mp3

The lower quality Lo-Fi version (mono, faster download, 14 MB) is at:
http://www.ecoshock.net/eshock08/ES_080829_Show_LoFi.mp3

There is no copyright on this work, feel free to use it as you like.

NY Times
August 27, 2008
The Energy Challenge
By MATTHEW L. WALD
Original article

VPO note - this article talks about the political and economic challenges of expanding North America’s electrical grid, but still ignores the physical limits - for instance, there’s a worldwide copper shortage. Where will the stuff (including oil) needed to build the grid come from? And at what price, if available?

When the builders of the Maple Ridge Wind farm spent $320 million to put nearly 200 wind turbines in upstate New York, the idea was to get paid for producing electricity. But at times, regional electric lines have been so congested that Maple Ridge has been forced to shut down even with a brisk wind blowing.

That is a symptom of a broad national problem. Expansive dreams about renewable energy, like Al Gore’s hope of replacing all fossil fuels in a decade, are bumping up against the reality of a power grid that cannot handle the new demands.

The dirty secret of clean energy is that while generating it is getting easier, moving it to market is not. Read the complete Post.

Tue Aug 26, 2008 3:51pm EDT
By Alister Doyle, Environment Correspondent
Original article

VPO note - in addition to perpetuating inefficiencies, fossil fuel subsidies also perpetuate governments. Also note the passing reference to demand destruction. Presumably the rich will get by fine without these subsidies. And instead, the poor will…? Another conundrum of Overshoot.

ACCRA (Reuters) - Abolishing subsidies on fossil fuels could cut world greenhouse gas emissions by up to 6 percent and also nudge up world economic growth, a U.N. report showed on Tuesday.

Subsidies on oil, gas or coal are meant to help the poor by lowering the price of energy but the report, issued on the sidelines of a 160-nation U.N. climate meeting in Ghana, said they often backfired by mainly benefiting wealthier people.

The study estimated that energy subsidies, almost all for fossil fuels, totaled about $300 billion a year or 0.7 percent of world gross domestic product (GDP).

“Cancelling these subsidies might reduce greenhouse gas emissions by as much as 6 percent a year while contributing 0.1 percent to global GDP,” it said. Read the complete Post.

By Timothy P. Carney
Examiner Columnist | 8/21/08 7:10 PM
Original article

Texas oil billionaire T. Boone Pickens is about to make a killing by selling water he doesn’t own. As he does it, it will be praised as a planet-friendly wind project. After he pulls it off, the media will deride it as craven capitalism. In truth, it is one the most audacious examples of politics for profit, showing how big government helps the biggest business steal from the rest of us. The plotline behind Pickens’ water-and-wind scheme is almost too rich to believe. If it were a movie script, reviewers would dismiss it as over-the-top.

The basic story amounts to this: Pickens, thanks to favors from state lawmakers whose campaigns he funded, has created a new government whose only voters are two of his employers; this has empowered Pickens to more cheaply pump water from an aquifer and, by use of eminent domain, seize land across 11 counties in order to pipe the water to Dallas. To win environmentalist approval of this hardly “sustainable” practice, he has piggybacked this water project onto a windmill project pitched as an alternative to oil. Read the complete Post.

Visit the conference website now.
Hold these dates for the Fifth U.S. Conference
on Peak Oil and Community Solutions:
October 31- November 2, 2008
Oakland University, Rochester, Michigan

Why Attend This Conference?

Skyrocketing oil prices, mounting geopolitical tensions, grave economic realities, and dangerous climate changes are threatening our lives and communities like never before.

The age of cheap, abundant fossil fuels is coming to an end, and urgent action is required to transform our over-consumptive society into one that uses far less energy.

By acting now to reduce household energy use and re-localize economic production, we can create resilient, sustainable communities that will be able to weather the coming economic and ecological storms. Read the complete Post.