Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Enter the Vancouver Tool Library, which loans out more than 2,000 items. It is part of a movement of Libraries of Things (LoT), which are taking the classic “reduce, reuse, recycle” mantra to new heights. These social enterprises share with the public everything from backpacks to boomboxes, baby carriers, and beer-brewing equipment. Some even rent ties and suit jackets for job seekers.
In mid-January, Adam Waterous, who operates the private equity firm Waterous Energy Fund, made a prediction about the crown jewel of the U.S. shale oil industry, the Permian shale play that straddles Texas and New Mexico.
“We think we are at or near peak Permian,” Waterous told Bloomberg. “The North American oil market has been grossly overcapitalized, which is not sustainable.”
Preventing food waste and shortening the food chain from farmer to consumer is the driving force behind a sustainable Crowdfarming project in Valencia. The brainchild of Gonzalo and Gabriel Úrculo, who found themselves with a semi-abandoned orange farm just outside Valencia, has been so successful, they are now at the forefront of an agricultural revolution in rural Spain.
In his new book Internationalism or Extinction, Noam Chomsky traces the duality of existential threats from nuclear weapons and climate change. He argues for the urgency of international climate and arms agreements, and shows how global popular movements are mobilizing to force governments to meet this unprecedented challenge to civilization’s survival.
History will recall that 2020 was the year climate issues finally mattered enough to voters to guide their hands when it came time to mark their ballots. Will history also record that the 2020 election resulted in the break-up of the Democratic party and that an underlying cause of the separation was the rise of the youth climate movement around the Green New Deal (GND)?
A new study published in Nature may have ended a long scientific debate about the key source of rising methane levels in the atmosphere.
It found that methane emissions from human activities — mainly fossil fuels — are probably 25 to 40 per cent higher than previously estimated, while natural sources of methane emissions are up to 90 per cent lower than previously estimated.
A new study reports that agroforestry—a method integrating trees with crops and livestock—is linked with more benefits for human and planetary health than previously thought. The study, conducted by a team of 21 researchers from World Agroforestry (ICRAF) and London’s School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, reveals agroforestry’s impacts on food and nutrition security in sub-Saharan Africa.
Our land has experienced centuries of woodland clearance, decades of overgrazing and burning upland heaths and bogs, and relatively recent ‘reclamation’ (for intensive farming) of heathy hillsides, scrubby banks, old pastures and floodplain meadows. On heavy clay soils, and where wetlands used to be, land drainage, river canalisation and dredging have enabled farmers to cultivate land where cultivation was considered impossible not that long ago.
Commoning may be rooted in a variety of social outlooks and behaviors, as we saw in Chapter Four. But can it govern? Can it do so better than existing governments? Can it coordinate more effectively and better than the market? These are large questions.
Like the White Queen in Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass, I have been practising, doing my best to believe impossible things before breakfast. Could these experiments with slower, deliberative modes of democracy carry the currents of indignation, transform them into a turning aside from business as usual? Could there be political leaders who come around to the need for such a turning, in the face of the enormity of the climate crisis?
When I asked Barábas what his party’s main messages were in the election, he was able to recite three immediately: a green city (more green space, fewer cars), spend money on healthcare not more of Orbán’s endless stadiums, and a wealth tax to redistribute the proceeds of corruption into healthcare – which allowed them to talk about Orbán’s oligarchs. Surprisingly few progressive parties have such good message discipline.
As oil prices plummet, oil bankruptcies mount, and investors shun the shale industry, America’s top oil field — the Permian shale that straddles Texas and New Mexico — faces many new challenges that make profits appear more elusive than ever for the financially failing shale oil industry.
Many of those problems can be traced to two issues for the Permian Basin: The quality of its oil and the sheer volume of natural gas coming from its oil wells.
