Eating fossil fuels for breakfast, lunch, and dinner
If you didn’t know better, you might think the planet was simply piling on to make a point. The extreme weather events of the last year have proven little short of biblical.
Year: 2011
Dear Stephen King: an open letter to one American who really could scare the rest of us into action
Given your influence and the speed with which you can turn out a blockbuster, Mr. King, you might take my feeble attempt to point out the error of our ways, turn the truth of it into fiction and a few million Americans into Committees of Correspondence, planners of a new Declaration of Independence, this time from the global economy and the Powers that run it and get the lion’s share of the benefit out of it.
ODAC Newsletter – June 3
The inherent contradictions of the UK government’s approach to energy and climate policy were made clearly visible this week. On the one hand Thursday saw the release of further detail around the Green Deal, a fairly ambitious bill aimed at facilitating the retrofitting of private homes in order to improve energy efficiency. On the other, evidence emerged that the UK is one of just two EU governments (the other is the Netherlands) stalling on a new EU fuel directive which would see oil from the Canadian tar sands banned in Europe, due to their high emissions.
Nuclear Fusion: the elusive genie
The recent announcement by two Italian researchers of a new method of attaining energy from nuclear fusion has brought back hopes of an easy and inexpensive way of generating energy. It is almost if the nuclear genie that Walt Disney had created in the 1950s is back with new promises of energy “too cheap to meter.” But what exactly do we expect from fusion? Why do we think it could solve our problems? Perhaps, these possibilities have been much overrated.
A comment on: “Public Health Concerns of Shale Gas Production”
A recent Post-Carbon Institute paper, “Public Health Concerns of Shale Gas Production,” (contained in: Natural Gas Report Supplements: Public Health Agriculture & Transportation) is plagued by irony: the authors’ (Brian Schwartz and Cindy Parker) commitment to protect public health nonetheless defaults into placing business interests ahead of the public interest.
New book to inspire a redesigned, fair food system
But Fair Food… is not a book primarily about the problems of our broken food system,” says Hesterman. “It is a book primarily about the solutions.” It serves as a guide to changing not only what we eat, but also how our food is grown, packaged, delivered, marketed, and sold. The book starts by outlining the nuances of our food system, how it evolved the way it did, and why it is failing us.
Oxfam predicts climate change will help double food prices by 2030: “We are turning abundance into scarcity”
Food prices may jump by as much as 180% by 2030, driven by poor policies and a changing climate. Already, the FAO estimates 1 billion people are starving and another 2.5 billion are malnourished. With food prices climbing, yield productivity flat lining, and the global population on track to hit 9 billion by 2050, it appears we are on the brink of major catastrophe.
Tranzicioni në prodhimin & furnizimin e ushqimeve – drejt një të ardhme pa burime fosile
Krijimi i këtyre sistemeve është bërë i mundur nga burimet fosile të energjisë, burime të jashtëzakonshme energjie, një dhuratë që natyra ja bën vetëm një herë njeriut. Albanian translation of the Post Carbon Institute report ‘The Food and Farming Transition’.
Post Carbon Institute Natural Gas Report Supplements: Public Health, Agriculture, & Transportation
The challenges posed by shale gas production have serious implications for the future of agriculture, transportation, and health in the United States. In this collection of articles, PCI Fellows explore what the Hughes Report means for these sectors.
Three strikes and you’re hot: Time for Obama to say no to the fossil fuel wish list
The Obama administration is making its biggest decisions yet on our energy future and those decisions are intimately tied to this continent’s geography. Remember those old maps from your high-school textbooks that showed each state and province’s prime economic activities? A sheaf of wheat for farm country? A little steel mill for manufacturing? These days in North America what you want to look for are the pickaxes that mean mining, and the derricks that stand for oil.
There is no wealth but life
Finally, in a move that became inevitable once bogus methods of valuing nature were invented by economists with the very same mental framework that produced sub-prime lending and credit-default swaps, a price has been put on the natural beauty of our land. Our country has been degraded into an accounting unit; our beautiful land has been marketised.
From King Coal to carbon tax: A historical perspective on the energy and climate-change debate
Current climate and energy policy debates in the United States rarely involve historians. If you search the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s 2007 synthesis report, you will not find the words history or historical. Even so, history pervades climate and energy policy discussions. History guides policy choices, inspires proposals for action, and structures institutional development.
