Welcome to my new blog.
This blog is about STUFF.
We're running out of it. Oh, there's still plenty of stuff around. Everything we see is stuff. We are stuff. What I'm referring to when I refer to "peak" stuff is stuff that really matters to our modern civilization, to our modern lifestyle, which as former V.P. Dick Cheney said was "non-negotiable" (I bet he'll be negotiating pretty hard here before long). It's about stuff economists and others refer to as Natural Resources. Like oil, for instance. Actually the term 'peak' is in honor of Marion King Hubbert, PhD (October 5, 1903 – October 11, 1989), the humble geoscientist who popularized this term, based on what is now known as the Hubbert Peak Theory or the Hubbert Curve of resource use and depletion. Hubbert is most well-known for his studies on the capacities of oil fields and natural gas reserves. He predicted that, for any given geographical area, from an individual oil field to the planet as a whole, the rate of petroleum production of the reserve over time would resemble a bell curve. Like this.
Based on his theory, he presented a paper to the 1956 meeting of the American Petroleum Institute in San Antonio, Texas, which predicted that overall petroleum production would peak in the United States between the late 1960s and the early 1970s. At first his prediction received much criticism, for the most part because many other predictions of oil capacity had been made over the preceding half century, but these had been based purely on reserve and production data rather than past discovery trends, and had proven false. Hubbert became famous when this prediction proved
correct in 1970! What a surprise that was. That's why we're sending billions of dollars to places like Saudia Arabia every day for stuff we used to pump out of our own section of the globe, so we can keep filling our Formula 1 race cars and our mobile death traps, otherwise known as Sport Utility Vehicles. You can read all about Hubbert here
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M._King_Hubbert
Besides sharing information about Peak Oil and similar phenomenon, I hope this blog instills in its readers the impetus to search beyond the popular news media to learn about the world we call Planet Earth and all its happenings. There is so much happening out there that you just won't find discussed on the 6:00 o'clock news or even the New York Times. So where
do you go? There are numerous, nay seemingly endless sources on the world wide web of in-depth, no-holds-barred, relevant news items. And to get cogent commentary on said news items, I prefer blogs such as this. I find many blogs to be refreshingly honest and beholden to no particular corporate interests, which always tend to skew or censor the news and commentary. Bloggers do often make money from blogging, yet usually indirectly by attracting readers who happen to click on ads that appear on the blog page. Maybe that's not that much different from corporate sponsored news, but my idealist side likes to think so. I will be sharing some of my favorite blog sites in these posts.
Stay tuned.
