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It’s been a laid back mixed day. A bit of this and a bit of that. It was hot and humid here yesterday. My Kiwi friends tell me we’ll only see two or three days like that in a year. Today, it was warm and humid again – but with rain on and off all day. It reminded me of the warm summer rains in Texas.

I put the new plate on the bike and the registration after I rode to get some parts. Then, a bit later, I went to South City Mall and had a vanilla milkshake and bought some groceries.

I rode around time several times today in the light warm rain – careful because the streets were probably slick but feeling pretty good – now that I am totally legal.

At lunch and again tonight, I had Thai left overs from my dinner party last night with Graham, Judy and Keith, my Kiwi friends and tennis partners downstairs. They’ve been really good to Sharon and I. I had them over for the evening and bought Thai takeout.

Scattered through the day I talked to Sharon at home twice and caught up on how her feet are healing from her surgery. It’s been three days now and it is beginning to get better.

I also finished a modification to a WordPress Blog Plug-in called WP-Members which allows a WordPress blog owner to secure the blog so that only folks who have registered and been given a password can access secured parts of the site. My friend Katy needed this and since I’m busy learning php and WordPress internals, it was a good little project.

Tonight, I watched an old SciFi movie on Prime called “Species” . it was basically a waste of time.

As I do everyday, I scanned through a lot of blogs and news items and picked out a few. The big news environmentally is the meeting in Bali. The IPCC has issued another strong statement and Al Gore is there rallying folks.

Notable was an article on the fact that some folks are saying now that they haven’t much faith in Biofuels. I haven’t had much faith in them for some time. For the most part, they represent a strategy of denial through diversion. Rather than deal with the fact that we can’t go on as we are, we try to work out some way that we can. But I doubt any of these diversions has any real chance of allowing us to dodge the bullet.

In another story, some scientists are beginning to say publicly what many have been feeling for some time – that we are not going to be able, at this late date, to curb our carbon output sufficiently to avoid significant climate change.

Peak Oil is a hot topic but in my view, its importance has been receding. Oh, we will peak on oil production but the back side of the slope will not be a precipitous drop. As the price of oil rises, the pain oil producers will be willing to go through to find and produce more of the stuff will increase. So, it will be a long slow decline and unfortunately, the very efforts that they will go through to find and refine more of the stuff will, in and of itself, be very destructive to the planet. We could, of course, begin to swear off oil as a bad way to go, but we won’t. Too many habits, too much invested and too much disbelief that the consequences of continuing with oil are really going to be bad. Just in the last two weeks there were three reports ➡, ➡, and ➡ of new sources of oil that have either just been discovered or which have become economically viable with the price of oil near $100 US. Research thanks to Mike D. on these three.

I always recommend the IPCC reports to folks if they want to get a good grounding in what’s going on by the most authoritative folks around. Here’s another good summary based on the IPCC’s data and reporting.

On any given day, I could find several reports of this kind. That’s not difficult. What’s difficult is deciding what, if anything, to do about it. To some extent, this blog is me thinking out-loud about it.

I’m one month into my three month sojourn to New Zealand this year. Things are now well settled and I can feel some contemplation time opening up. That will be nice.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 12th, 2007 at 02:16 and is filed under New Zealand, Personal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.