Report by the Connecticut Legislative Peak Oil and Natural Gas Caucus to the governor and legislative leaders, outlining the current world energy situation and its potential impacts on the state of Connecticut. It also includes a list of "Intelligent Responses" -- recommendations for action on the part of the state.

This section, an appendix from Post Carbon Cities: Planning for Energy and Climate Uncertainty, will help you (a municipal elected official or staff member) develop a volunteer-based task force to inquire into the vulnerabilities your community faces in peak oil, and to develop recommendations for response actions.

The U.S. government's Energy Information Administration announced bad news on the fuel front. The announcement, predicting that gasoline prices are due to go up another 20 cents a gallon in the next few weeks, has been reported on widely. But the real message to take from this announcement is that the EIA is seeing, and starting to report, a real change in the oil markets.

Charles Lockwood interviews Post Carbon Institute President Julian Darley about peak oil and what it means for the shape of human settlement. From the October edition of Urban Land, published by the Urban Land Institute.

Oil shortages are a lot less simple than having to turn down the A/C and line up to refill the gas tank. For one thing, models predict that once production starts slipping, it’ll slip fast – far faster than it’ll take to replace our needs with wind, solar or even nuclear. And in the last five decades, we’ve become dependent on petroleum in countless ways, and seemingly insignificant disruptions in supply can have far-reaching repercussions.

It is surprising that the world economy has managed to carry on growing strongly despite the recent rise in oil prices. There's growing recognition of the finite limits to global oil production, but also growing demand that probably can't be offset by efficiencies in developed countries. While it's hard to connect the current US economic slump with oil prices, the impact of rising prices will be felt sooner or later.

A report on international oil supplies released Wednesday by the International Energy Agency suggests that oil prices could move irreversibly over the $100-a-barrel threshold in the not too distant future, as the global economy faces a serious energy shortage.

Numerous reasons are given, but the end message from OPEC representatives is the same: oil prices are going to hit $100/barrel and probably continue rising. Consuming countries, they argued, will simply have to deal with the fact that new pockets of oil are getting far harder and more expensive to tap.

On June 23, 2005, a group of nine former White House cabinet and senior national security officials convened to participate in a simulated working group of a White House cabinet. Their task: to advise an American president as the nation grapples with an oil crisis over a seven-month period. As they entered the room, they were unaware of the circumstances or nature of the oil crisis. This is the report they made on that simulation.

Slides and notes from a presentation at the 2006 Atlantic Planners' Institute Conference on how the assumptions behind planning decisions will have to adapt to the changing reality of energy.