STATE HOUSE – Rhode Islanders will have a chance to examine “Cheap Oil - Going, Going, GONE!” on Monday, April 21, at 3 p.m. The lecture, presented by the Progressive Legislators Group and the Environment Council, will be in the Room 313 of the State House is free and open to the public.
Richard Heinberg, one of the world’s foremost experts on peak oil and its impact on industrial society, will speak on the end of cheap oil and what it means for America and the world. The term “peak oil” refers to the point at which half of the oil the planet once had is extracted. The remaining half will be increasingly harder to extract and therefore more costly. Some will be too costly to extract at all. Once the peak is reached, the cost of oil will steadily and permanently increase, along with the price of everything dependent upon it.
As gasoline streaks toward $3.50, $4 and more a gallon, how will we get to work and school? What kind of education will we need? Mr. Heinberg will cover these questions and more and look at the ramifications of a life without cheap oil.
Heinberg is a senior fellow of the Post Carbon Institute in California and is internationally renowned as a leader and educator in awakening the public to the impending energy declines as we enter the post-carbon era. He writes a regular column for The Ecologist and has authored scores of articles that have appeared in such periodicals as The American Prospect, Public Policy Research, Quarterly Review, Z Magazine, Resurgence, The Futurist, European Business Review, Earth Island Journal, Alternative Press Review and The Sun; and on Web sites such as EnergyBulletin.net, GlobalPublicMedia.com, ProjectCensored.com, Counterpunch.com and Alternet.org.
Among Heinberg’s several books are “The Party’s Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies” (2003, 2005); “Powerdown: Options and Actions for a Post-Carbon World” (2004); “The Oil Depletion Protocol: A Plan to Avert Oil Wars, Terrorism and Economic Collapse” (2006); and “Peak Everything: Waking Up to the Century of Declines” (2007). Currently, he is completing a book on coal, “The Great Coal Rush and Why It Will Fail,” to be published later this year by New Society Publishers. He has appeared in numerous video documentaries, including “The End of Suburbia” and in Leonardo DiCaprio's “11th Hour.”