Disasters such as the huge Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico are likely to become more common as we approach peak oil.
Peak oil refers to the moment when we've used up half of all the known oil, leaving a declining quantity of oil that is increasingly hard - and therefore expensive - to extract from increasingly difficult locations, such as in deep oceans or tar sands (one of the world's dirtiest fuel sources yet).
The implications of peak oil are significant for other reasons. Rising extraction costs and declining supply will force the price of oil to rocket, causing economic meltdown. And economic meltdown will lead, inevitably, to social meltdown and global conflict.
In fact Lardelli suggests the inability to increase oil supply and the subsequent spike in oil prices were the real cause of the recent global financial crisis.
But we can't wait until we run out of oil to switch to other energy sources such as renewables, because it will take a lot of energy to build the solar power stations and wind farms and so on that we'll need to get the clean energy revolution started. If we wait until the oil runs out, it will be too late.
That's why Bill Gates, no less, has recently helped set up the American Energy Innovation Council.
As Gates points out, "although the information technology and pharmaceutical industries spend 5 to 15 per cent of their revenue on research and development each year, US companies’ spending on energy R&D has averaged only about one-quarter of 1 per cent of revenue over the past 15 years." (That's energy R&D overall, so the proportion spent on clean energy research would be even lower.)
Two UK pioneers of the Transition Town concept will be visiting Australia to conduct two two-day workshops in January and February 2009 as part of a "world tour". The two venues are the Sunshine Coast in Queensland and Bowral in the NSW Southern Highlands. Full details can be found here.
Some big guns in the US are beginning to throw their weight behind renewable energy. Over there, the issue is often presented as "energy security" and reducing dependence on foreign oil imports, rather than reducing climate change, but never mind.
You wake up to a beautiful day, blue skies and birds singing. Then you read something like this, an article about oil exploration in the western Amazon. In Peru, 72 per cent of the country's Amazon region has been approved for oil exploration - most of it since 2003.
