NickBlack.com

I’m initiating this blog primarily as a platform to develop new projects and collaborate with others. Secondarily, it’s a convenient place for people to find me.

For the last few years working on various films, the background of virtually all the stories about diasporas, collapsing cultures, and individual tales of displacement seems to be rooted in Ecology – using the term in the broadest sense as a way of talking about all the complex systems that make up our world, including government and economics etc. – and Energy, which is the fundamental flow that supports the entire system. In a very real sense Ecology is the study of Energetic Complex Systems. That’s my working perspective.

The most immediate Project I’m working on is Peak Oil. The arguments are over, Peak Oil is upon us and despite the efforts of a host of “Cassandras”, including some of the most respected names in the oil industry, and the efforts of some in media, including myself, precious little of this debate was ever allowed onto mainstream news or factual programming. I’m working with Richard Hind to produce a “graphic novel” style series on this site, about Peak Oil – how we got here, and what the likely scenarios are as we go into production decline.

The most recent estimates are that we just passed the peak in 2006. We won’t know for sure until perhaps 2009, but we are clearly on the last plateau. So it appears that our use of fossil fuels for the last 150 years has placed us in a potentially difficult position. One the one hand the years of increasing energy supply allowed the population to expand by a factor of 6, unprecedented in human history, and at the same time the burning of the fuels sent the CO2 concentration from 280 ppm prior to industrialization to the current level of 381ppm, which is also unprecedented in human history. Whether our species has the time or ability to adapt to these new environmental and energy constraints is the question.