28 October: State Election Forum: Vic MPs to take planning questions from the public

Hi Robert, If you are still around, please email me back which Robert you are. :-) I have not looked at ER recently, but I have looked at ROEOZ (Australia) and encountered about three people. I heard that the owner pulled the plug due to presence of spies. There was a recent discussion about restarting it somewhere else, but this ran into technical problems. I think it will restart, however. I think that ERT is still going, plus some others started. With regard to Andrew McK, he disappeared before the first ed of The Final Energy Crisis was finished, which is why I became the co-editor. I finished it for him. I was then asked to single edit the second edition. I invited Andrew to contribute some articles and he actually turned up in Australia a week or two before the 2nd edition, (which had almost all new articles) was finalised. He seemed to want part of the (pitiful) proceeds, but since he had failed to pay me for my work on the first edition, that was not going to happen. He subsequently, I believe, edited a new book of articles, in part or in whole on nuclear energy. Tony Boys, who wrote the chapter on post fossil fuel survival in Japan and North Korea, was a contributor to this new book, I think. I never made any statements as to when post peak might become so pressing that we could be sure that we were hitting the skids. I think that kind of prediction wore out a few authors and participants in various lists. However the energy resources problem is still very much to the foreground, albeit sometimes overshadowed by attention to greenouse gases, and it is time we all revisited it. The impact on democracy of fracking (apart from its other problems) was predictable (if fracking was not). Geodestinies author was correct in predicting unprecedented opencut mining. Growing populations and economic growth hasten all our problems. Poor people, especially in poor countries, are the first to experience shortage, but we rarely hear about them. Privatisation of power is an aspect of cashing in on energy resource scarcity. Myself, I have been occupied writing a series of books on different systems that either promote overshoot or mitigate against it. This series is called, Demography Territory Law. Read more here: /node/1882. The first explores population theories and histories of different peoples and economies - also different species. The second explores the origins of Capitalism in Britain and looks at the contribution of coal and iron and overpopulation there. The third is in progress and explores why the French had a democratic revolution, began to use contraception and stabilise population in the 18th C before other European countries, and links this to land-use planning and inheritance. All these books stemmed from energy resources preoccupations. Sheila Newman, The Final Energy Crisis, 2nd Edition, Pluto Books, 2008 is well worth reading for its exploration of post fossil fuel survival, if you are interested, especially for Australia and France. I never had much time to publicise it and I think that someone's resentment about rights to the second edition caused problems with publicity in the usual lists. Let us know your thoughts and perhaps contribute an article.' best, Sheila N