Archive for the ‘Juneau’ Category

The Instant Energy-Loss Diet: How to Massively Reduce Unsightly Power Consumption Overnight

An unplugged electrical outlet. (Image credit: Chameleon at Wikimedia Commons, released into public domain.)Gas prices are sky-high and people are hurting. Is it market speculation, tight supplies or the first throes of peak oil? And, if it’s the latter, how can civilization survive?

Well, residents of the small Alaskan capital of Juneau are showing us how. Following an April 16 avalanche that severed the city’s main power lines, Juneau found itself forced to cut its energy calories big-time literally overnight. It was that, or face energy bills double or triple or many times more than the month before. The good news: society didn’t collapse.

How did residents do it? Let’s count the ways: Read the rest of this entry »

How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love Peak Oil

Forecasts for the arrival of peak oil around the globe. (Image credit: Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas (ASPO) at Wikimedia Commons, free license to publish.)I’ve recently witnessed a few scenes of life after peak oil, and it isn’t necessarily the Apocalypse.

In Juneau, Alaska, for example, people are proving it’s possible to change our energy-hogging ways literally overnight and still keep a community up and running. The inspiration in their case: an avalanche that severed the hydroelectric power lines serving the remote Alaska capital, cutting off about 80 percent of the city’s available electricity.

Read the rest of this entry »

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