Loading

Tag archives for Peak Oil

A carmaker against the stream

10 comments
lars-henriksson

Lars Henriksson at work. Photo: Lotta Törnroth.

Lars Henriksson, who normally spends his days assemblying Volvo cars in Gothenburg, is quite an unusual car worker. The last few years he has been attracting a lot of attention for arguing that the world already has too many cars – so why not use the factories, with their advanced technology and efficient machinery, to produce other things?

book-cover

Lars Henriksson’s book, Slutkört (meaning something like “The end of driving”).

Earlier this year Lars Henriksson collected his thoughts in a book. One of his main points is that a society which is facing both Peak Oil and climate change will need a lot of new technology, like windfarm parts or podcars. He and his colleagues are fully qualified to start manufacturing these things instead of cars, he argues.

Lars Henriksson draws parallells to the Second World War, when the United States managed to switch their car production into making national defence material in just a few months time. Why couldn’t we do that now too, although not being in a war? is his question.

Having been a car worker for over 30 years, this of course isn’t uncontroversial. When a magazine published an interview with Lars Henriksson on the Internet, it soon got a lot of commentaries accusing him of wanting to go back to the Stone Age. Cars give many a sense of freedom and independence. But others seem inspired and hopeful: Could this be a way to keep the jobs in a car industry that has been experiencing hard times lately?

Sara Jeswani - Sustainability

August 8, 2011

OIL makes the world go round – but for how much longer?

9 comments

Recently a new exhibition opened at the photo museum Fotografiska here in Stockholm. It’s the Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky who has spent the last 12 years portraying humanity’s relation to oil and what it does to the planet. He shows the oil fields – from the first one in the US to depleted ones in Azerbaijan – giant highway intersections, graveyards for engines, tires and oil tankers being dismantled by hand in Bangladesh. One year ago he also went to cover the disaster in the Mexican Gulf, when the BP oil drilling rig Deepwater Horizon exploded.

Highway

Highway intersection from the exhibition OIL at Fotografiska in Stockholm. Highway #1 © Edward Burtynsky, courtesy Stefan Röpke, Köln/Flowers, London/Nicholas Metivier, Toronto.

Walking around at the museum I was hit by how massively our love story with this energy source affects the planet on all possible ways. But there are plenty of voices saying that this can’t go on forever. One of them is the physics professor Kjell Aleklett, Sweden’s own “Mr Peak Oil” who has spent the last 16 years doing research about Peak Oil and who is indefatigable repeating the message that oil is in fact a limitied resource.

Peak Oil means that when half the oil available on Earth has been pumped up and used (with production at its peak), the extraction of new oil will inevitably fall. According to Kjell Aleklett we passed this peak already in 2006, while our demand for oil just keeps growing. During the last decade he has been talking about the urgency of adapting to a future with less oil, targeting business leaders and politicians. Because adapting, says Kjell Aleklett, won’t happen fast. We need about 20 years to get rid of our oil dependance.

In Sweden our electricity comes from nuclear energy. Most people no longer heat their houses with oil. But – Kjell Aleklett points out – we still fuel most of our vehicles with oil, transporting people and goods that we would have a hard time living without. Since 1970 that oil consumption has gone up by 83 percent. So there’s a lot to do in Sweden too.

Tomorrow Kjell Aleklett will speak about Peak Oil in the European Parliament. In a debate article in one of Sweden’s largest morning papers a few weeks ago he wrote “I hope it will contribute to a review of the European Union’s energy policies. In ten years it will be too late.”

Tires

A graveyeard for old tires photographed by Edward Burtynsky. Oxford Tire Pile #2 © Edward Burtynsky, courtesy Stefan Röpke, Köln/Flowers, London/Nicholas Metivier, Toronto.

Oxford Tire Pile #2 © Edward Burtynsky, courtesy Stefan Röpke, Köln/Flowers, London/Nicholas Metivier, Toronto

Sara Jeswani - Sustainability

May 2, 2011

Oil vs muscle power

16 comments
smoothie-bike

Matlinah Omiti (in the middle) demonstrates her "smoothie bicycle".

Kjell-Aleklett

Kjel Aleklett talking about future energy challenges.

Yesterday Tällberg Foundation arranged something they called “A Day For the Future” at Skeppsholmen, which is one of the islands in central Stockholm.
Having spent the weekend trying to suck the last sweet nectar out of this wonderful summer at Möja, another island further out in the archipelago, I arrived just in time to hear the “peak oil guru” professor Kjell Aleklett and his colleagues from Uppsala University talk about our energy future.

The theories about exactly when peak oil will happen differs, but the fact that oil is a limited resource and that we won’t have cheap and easily accessible oil forever is something that humanity will have to deal with, whether we like it or not. The question is just how.
Right now more than 80 percent of the world’s energy mix comes from fossil fuels.
Kersti Johansson, a researcher at Aleklett’s institution held a very interesting talk about the possibility to replace the fossil fuels that now are used for transportation with bio energy coming from agricultural crops or spill. Her calculations show that it will be very difficult, unless we want to grow crops for energy production instead of for food.

Not far from the museum library where the Peak Oil seminar was held I found something that makes it even more obvious what a lot of energy we use in our daily life. Matlinah Omiti from the Royal Institute of Technology showed me the “Smoothie Bike” that she has constructed. By peddalling you power a blender and mix your own delicious fruit drink. I tried it, and actually it doesn’t take a lot of sweat. By increasing the resistance you could make other things work with your muscle power, Matlinah explained to me. You can for example light up one light bulb or a wall of LED lamps, and you could grind coffe. But when it comes to boiling the water for that coffee, you will fail, because boiling water requires so much energy!

Last year the BBC actually made a very funny show on this subject, connecting the energy grid of a house where a family was living their “ordinary” life to a hall with cyclist, powering the home with excercise bikes. 78 frantically pedalling cyclists were needed in order for the father of the house to take a shower…
Maybe we should start using gym bikes a bit more efficiently?

Sara Jeswani - Sustainability

August 30, 2010

Brown dystopia or green hope?

11 comments

“Brown dystopia or green hope?” was the question that scientists from Stockholm Environment Institute asked themselves, when gathering to discuss the future.
Their message was that the world has been focusing too much on climate change and thereby missing another immense challenge that we’ll soon have to face: Peak Oil.

Either we want it or not we will have to deal with both energy shortage because of decreasing resources of cheap oil and climate change caused by the fossil fuels that we nevertheless burn. How something can at the same time be too little and too much is a tricky thing to grasp. But the answer to both these problems are actually the same: We have to get out of the fossil fuels era.
There are different ways in which this can happen, though, which was SEI’s expert on scenarios Carl Hallding has tried to describe in four different scenarios:

Green hope: Neither rapid climate change nor oil crisis
Green strategic behaviour. We all take action and do what’s needed, to provide a planet which is safe for all. Urban food production, alternative energy, green technology.

Brown dystopia- no oil crisis, but rapid climate change
Authoritarianism and a fortress world. Hallding describes a society where coastal areas are wiped out and only the richer countries can cope with the situation, and leave the poorer world to itself.

Is small beautiful? Oil crisis, but slow climate change
High energy prices, end of globalisation, dramatic agricultural impacts. A future where we will have to go back to a way of living that was more common historically.

Wake of the flood
Reduced populations and islands of survival. Hallding call it “a kind of Mad Max future”, with wars and a hunter and gather society – for those who can make it.

These scenarios are of course stereotypes, he emphasizes. But it’s a way of showing where we could be heading. Choosing the most desirable one isn’t difficult, but will we take the action needed for that? Watch the full presentations.

Sara Jeswani - Sustainability

July 5, 2010