{"id":13202,"date":"2015-10-09T07:25:01","date_gmt":"2015-10-09T12:25:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=13202"},"modified":"2015-10-09T07:25:01","modified_gmt":"2015-10-09T12:25:01","slug":"michael-klare-tipping-points-and-the-question-of-civilizational-survival","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=13202","title":{"rendered":"Michael Klare, Tipping Points and the Question of Civilizational Survival"},"content":{"rendered":"

Tipping Points and the Question of Civilizational Survival<\/a><\/h3>\n

In mid-August,\u00a0TomDispatch<\/em>\u2019s Michael Klare\u00a0wrote<\/a>\u00a0presciently of the oncoming global oil glut, the way it was driving the price of petroleum into the \u201cenergy subbasement,\u201d and how such a financial \u201crout,\u201d if extended over the next couple of years, might lead toward a new (and better) world of energy.\u00a0 As it happens, the first good news of the sort Klare was imagining has since come in.\u00a0 In a country where the price of gas at the pump now averages\u00a0$2.29<\/a>\u00a0a gallon (and in some places has dropped under $1.90), Big Oil has begun cutting back on its\u00a0devastating<\/a>\u00a0plans to extract every imaginable drop of fossil fuel from the planet and burn it.\u00a0 Oil companies have also been\u00a0laying off<\/a>\u00a0employees by the\u00a0tens of thousands<\/a>\u00a0and deep-sixing, at least for now, plans to search for and exploit\u00a0tar sands<\/a>\u00a0and other \u201ctough oil\u201d deposits worldwide.<\/p>\n

In that context, as September ended, after a\u00a0disappointing<\/a>\u00a0six weeks of drilling, Royal Dutch Shell\u00a0cancelled<\/a>\u00a0\u201cfor the foreseeable future\u201d its search for oil and natural gas in the tempestuous but melting waters of the Alaskan Arctic.\u00a0 This was no small thing and a great\u00a0victory<\/a>\u00a0for an environmental movement that had long fought to put obstacles in the way of Shell\u2019s exploration plans.\u00a0 Green-lighted by the Obama administration to drill in the Chukchi Sea this summer, Shell has over the\u00a0last nine years<\/a>\u00a0sunk more than $7 billion into its Arctic drilling project, so the decision to close up shop was no small thing and offers a tiny ray of hope for what\u00a0activism<\/a>\u00a0can do when reality offers a modest helping hand.<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Tipping Points and the Question of Civilizational Survival In mid-August,\u00a0TomDispatch\u2019s Michael Klare\u00a0wrote\u00a0presciently of the oncoming global oil glut, the way it was driving the price of petroleum into the \u201cenergy subbasement,\u201d and how such a financial \u201crout,\u201d if extended over the next couple of years, might lead toward a new (and better) world of energy.\u00a0 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,7],"tags":[138,9741,141,8103,3022,9740,6463],"class_list":["post-13202","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-environment","category-survival-2","tag-civilisation","tag-civilisational-survival","tag-climate-change","tag-michael-klare","tag-royal-dutch-shell","tag-tipping-points","tag-tom-dispatch"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13202","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=13202"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13202\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13203,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13202\/revisions\/13203"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13202"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=13202"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=13202"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}