Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Danish director Michael Madsen’s ‘Into Eternity’ masterfully debunks industry claims that nuclear power is ‘clean’ energy. And its deadpan Nordic style and lush cinematography is hauntingly beautiful, creating a meditative mood on the deeply troubling topic of nuclear waste. English and Finnish with subtitles. 75 minutes.
Pathetically the media has been awash with New York Congressmember Anthony Weiner’s string of electronic sexual peccadillos. Punctuating the sensationalism, and between the TV commercials from the oil, gas, coal and nuclear industries, are story after story of extreme weather events. Herein lies the real scandal: Why aren’t the TV meteorologists, with each story, following the words “extreme weather” with another two, “climate change”?
Recent suggestions that the current boom in natural gas will be a bridge to a future of sustainable energy are highly reminiscent of similar claims from the past — claims that turned out to be entirely wrongheaded. A bridge is only useful if there’s somewhere to get to on the other side, and in the future ahead of us, the other side will inevitably be defined by much less energy use. With the help of a photovoltaic panel, the Archdruid explains.
Chancellor Angela Merkel surprised many with her May 30 announcement of a complete shut down of all Germany’s reactors by January 1st, 2022 and the shutdown of 14 of Germany’s total of 17 reactors well before that date. The German chancellor has, in nine months, gone from touting nuclear plants as a safe “bridge” to renewable energy and easing regulatory constraints on extending reactor lifetimes, to pushing the biggest and fastest nuclear exit strategy in any country using nuclear power.
As much as anywhere in the United States, South Bend has prospered by capitalizing on the promise of the commons — which means assets belonging to all of us, from water and wilderness to the Internet and cultural treasures. The commons also refers to a new ethic of sharing and cooperation that can help solve pressing problems of the 21st century, advocates say. This ethic has come to influence decision making at all levels in South Bend, bringing big changes to city hall, businesses and neighborhoods.
As supply and demand factors increasingly point to a future in which natural gas plays a greater role in the global energy mix, the International Energy Agency (IEA) on Monday released a special report exploring the potential for a “golden age” of gas. The new report, part of the World Energy Outlook (WEO) 2011 series, examines the key factors that could result in a more prominent role for natural gas in the global energy mix, and the implications for other fuels, energy security and climate change.
For all the People is a magnificent, comprehensive and detailed history of co-operatives and collectives of all kinds in the USA.
Despite the fact that you have a life, a job, a family, volunteer responsibilities and enough backlog in your life to keep you busy until 2182, you’ve decided that you are going to do food preservation too. This means finding time to do so, and that isn’t easy. It helps to plan for the realities of the harvest – and this is planning that applies both to people with gardens who may now be planting, and people who plan to put up food from local farmers.
Could Rob Hopkins become the US right wing’s next Van Jones? Could the Post Carbon Institute become the next ACORN? A new video from the Tea Party attacks the Transition movement and fingers both Hopkins and PCI as part of a United Nations plot to “take away your land.” Silly? For sure. But given how much money from big polluters is behind such attacks, we ignore them at our peril.
For some time a small group of ecological economists has been suggesting that we switch the tax base from income (value added to natural resources by labor and capital), and on to natural resources themselves. Value added to resources is something we want more of, so don’t tax it (either at each stage of production as in Europe, or at the final stage as income as in the U.S.). The resource throughput, beginning with depletion and ending with pollution (both real costs), is something we want less of in a full world economy, so let’s tax it.
In 2008, economists and scientists met in Paris to discuss “Economic Degrowth for Ecological Sustainability and Social Equity.” The Degrowth (Décroissance) movement grew from this economic revolution in France. In 2010, a similar conference convened in Barcelona. For the last two years I have helped organize the Degrowth Conference in Vancouver, Canada. Journalists and traditional economists have asked why a degrowth movement is necessary. Here are answers to their questions…
Read the transcript from our live webchat about the power of storytelling to engage people around the challenges we all face. Facing the future through fiction!
