The Oil Drum: Australia/New Zealand

What Matters

Like many of you, I want to "make a difference." I have felt this way as long as I can remember. After my first child was born, it became almost an obsession to make a better future for the generations that follow. When I see children enduring hardship, I internalize that by imagining my own children in that situation (this is why I avoid the news, as well as any discussions of “Die-Off”). Sometimes I wish I didn’t feel this way as it is often depressing, but this is the way my brain is wired. I strongly feel that we are making choices today that are setting up future generations for just the kind of hardship that troubles me. This, above all else, is what motivates me. And while I may fail to make a difference, I am compelled to try.

A big concern for me is that quality of life for a large segment of the world’s population - never good to begin with - is poised for further deterioration as fossil fuel supplies deplete. Quality of life to me starts with the basics: People have enough food and clean water, they have shelter, they live and work in safe conditions, and they have adequate access to affordable energy. At various stages of my life I have had involvement in projects in all of these areas, but most of my career has been focused on the energy portion – both in providing adequate supplies, and in urging conservation efforts to stretch our supplies.

A couple of interesting things emerged in the comment thread of the previous post. You might have seen us play with blogpulse in past posts. Well now, google has a new tool (posted by stiffpicken and expanded on by Mike A) that looks at trends in google searches. Here's a link to the 'peak oil' search, and here's a link to the 'peak oil' versus 'gas prices' search. Click around between the two, and you will notice a few things.

Stiffpicken says rightly: "I punched in "peak oil" ... search volume appears to have hit its own plateau but news volume is on the rise." Then Mike A notices: "What is really SOBERING though, is to compare search and news volumes between 'peak oil' and 'gas prices'. 'Peak oil' hardly shows a blip compared to 'gas prices', which implies to me that most people are still not making the connection. [...] Again, check the distribution of languages - in English 'gas prices' have far, far more results, but the Europeans seem to "get it", with 'peak oil' having more responses in Swedish, Finnish, Dutch & German (in that volume order)."

Then I was playing around and made a couple more observations: 1) Portland seems to be the most peak aware city via google, followed by Austin and Seattle. 2) BUT, even more interestingly, look at the regions tab. New Zealand and Australia have more raw numbers of people (i.e., not percentages folks) searching for "peak oil" than in the United States! What's the population proportion between the US and those two countries? 20m-ish for Australia and 4m-ish for New Zealand, compared to 300m-ish for the US!

We have much work to do in the US folks. Much much work. And good on you New Zealand and Oz!

Jamais had another good catch today...
If you have not played with Google Earth yet, it's a fun enough toy.  However, this piece at Nature on the progression of H5N1 Avian Flu in Asia into Europe is really interesting: (link)

here's a link to a geographic plot (called a 'mashup') of the progression over time, which can be found here (a google earth data file): (link)

All of this is referenced by Jamais at WorldChanging here: (link)

Here's a link that details how the file was built: (link)

I don't know how many of you have any experience with GIS/spatial regression and such, but these tools are very powerful if we have the data.  

Of course, this all leads me to start thinking of peak oil applications...talk about thinking outside the, er, box...

If you've ever tried to search for this site using Google, you may have noticed you only get hits for the old Blogger site. In fact, it turns out that www.theoildrum.com is not indexed by Google at all! If you want to know why this is happening and maybe help us solve the problem, read below the fold.

Update [2005-9-30 10:20:36 by Super G]: Progress has been made! Now a search of site:theoildrum.com brings us up. We are also indexed by Google Blog search. If someone out there helped us out, thanks!