The warm weather in November has got me in a gardening mood, so I decided to build a straw bale cold frame with the windows I found earlier this year. I got 10 straw bales at the local feed store, a couple of 10 foot 2 x 6 and I was ready to go. First I arranged five strawbales in a U shape facing south.

This was across some existing beds, so the soil’s already in good shape. My goal is to grow hardy salad greens in here over the winter: cress, sorrel, spinach, lettuce, chard, chickory. I raked out the mulch a little to create a good seed bed.

I bought a thermometer at the local hardware store to hang inside.

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The Guardian posted an article quoting two anonymous senior IEA officials as saying the agency has systematically overstated oil reserves and capacity under pressure from the U.S. We are, in fact, running out of oil. At ASPO a few weeks ago, Jeffrey Brown indicated that Saudi Arabia is probably past peak.

I’ve been periodically scanning the MSM for cornucopian arguments against Peak Oil and they all rely on the same tired arguments: there’s lots of oil in the ground, we can recover all or most of the oil still left in depleted fields, technology will allow this all to happen, the Tupi field doubles known reserves, etc. which counter none of the peakist arguments. Regardless of all this oil in the ground, we won’t be able to recover more than a tiny fraction. I’d be surprised if any of the Tupi field, under 6000 meters of ocean water and salt, will ever be produced.

35 years ago we had a chance to move to a more sustainable living arrangement in a managed way. Now I fear we can only move there in an unmanaged, chaotic way. In any case, our long term prospects hinge on our ability to live off incoming solar energy, rather than our fossil inheritance. There is no alternative to sustainability.