Energy, climate, and planetary limits

Welcome to my page on Energy and Limits, slowly being built-up and expanded as I complete additional essays and presentations. The purpose of this page is as an accessible primer on issues of limits and energy.

We live in a finite world, with finite soil, water, and resources. Yet we in North America live in an economic system premised on indefinite growth. A collision between the finite and the indefinite is absolutely inevitable.

There are a great number of web pages on energy, limits, peak oil, and any number of doomsday scenarios from the mild to the extreme. The purpose of this page is not to be yet another opinion piece – too many of those are already available – but more a collections of essays, presentations, and useful links, particularly for people who have attended my presentations and wish to review the slides, or to have sources of further information.

It is very difficult to present the issues facing our society and the planet in a straightforward manner:

  1. There are many issues: Peak oil, limitations of other energy sources, global warming, ecosystem destruction, limits on arable land, desertification and salination.

  2. The issues cannot be treated in isolation: Any attempt to look at a single issue, ignoring the others, cannot help but reach misleading or naive conclusions.

  3. The issues are complex: The science behind oil reservoir characterization and global warming is not simple, it takes a great deal of study to understand these issues with any depth. Furthermore, to understand the impact of these problems on society probably requires a good understanding of history, psychology, sociology, and politics.

  4. Much of the material reported in the popular press is misleading: For every serious study there are any number of armchair physicists and engineers who claim to debunk or solve the problem.

  5. There are strong, vested interests opposed to examining and addressing these problems: A lot of corporate and political groups are particularly well-served by the current status-quo.

My name is Paul Fieguth and I have put this page together, mostly for people who have seen my presentations and want to delve more deeply into the topics. I am an professor in engineering at the University of Waterloo. My research specialties are in spatial and hierarchical statistics, not directly related to energy and climate issues, however I have also done a great deal of reading into matters of fossil fuels, climate, alternative energy, and social change. I have started giving presentations and created this page because I truly believe that the combined forces of energy depletion and human-caused ecosystem change will lead to very difficult times. However the better these problems are understood, and the greater the degree of preparation, the better a society or region will be able to manage.

For those people not familiar with energy limits, I would suggest starting with one of the following:

The rest of this page is organized into the following sections:

Primers on Peak Oil:

Comprehensive Energy Discussion Sites:

  • The Oil drum, a comprehensive discussion of oil, energy, and societal responses

  • Matt Savinar's site (definitely on the more extreme/doom end of things)

A List of my Articles:

  • Article #1: An introduction to limits

  • Article #2: Limits and Ecology -- Spending our Children's World

  • Article #3: Limits and Energy -- A Tale of Oil

  • Article #4: Limits and Society -- A House built on Sand

  • Article #5: Energy and Food -- Eating fossil fuels

  • Article #6: Limits and Wealth -- Some have more than others

  • Article #7: Limits and Conflict -- The Obligations of the Peacemaker

  • Article #8: A Theology of Limits -- What to do when there is not enough

  • Article #9: Moving Ahead -- Despair or Determination

  • Article #10: Moving Ahead -- Ideas for Change

A List of my Presentations:

How to Respond, Ideas for Change:

  • A detailed, one-page list of ideas , from the easy and straightforward to the challenging and life-changing. Please print it out, add your own tasks, circle those tasks you want to aim for.

  • Journey to Forever: a huge web site with tons of material on sustainable living, alternative energy.

Books, Further References:

Author

Title

Topics

Meadows et al

Limits to growth

Sustainability

Schumacher

Small is beautiful

Sustainability

Kunstler

Home from nowhere

Sustainability, urban planning

Jacobs

Dark ages ahead

Urban planning, societal collapse

Tainter

Collapse

Societal collapse

Wright

A short history of progress

Societal collapse

Heinberg

The party's over

Peak oil

Simmons

Twilight in the desert

Peak oil

Darley

High noon for natural gas

Peak gas

Heinberg

Powerdown

Living with peak oil

Kunstler

The long emergency

Living with peak oil

Grignon

Money as debt

Banking, money, and exponential growth

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