Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Now that farmer-watching has become more popular than bird-watching, urban people need a way to help them distinguish between the various breeds in case they want to rent one, or buy one for a personal pet. Farmers actually resemble other members of the human race in most respects. They walk upright if there is no wheeled vehicle available to ride, have cell phones hanging on their ears most of the time, and feed at short order restaurants more than in their natural environment of open fields… Zoologists distinguish several sub-types of the species…
Proponents of a steady state economy could get a boost from religious congregations…Religious communities are good places to look for allies because, over the past 15 years, many congregations have developed an interest in exploring human duties to creation. The concept of stewardship of creation is gaining widespread support among those who believe in God as the creator of the universe.
World-renowned conservation scientist Gary Nabhan is an author and farmer at Patagonia, Arizona along the Mexican border, raising sheep, heritage grains, and orchard fruits…When asked his definition of sustainable, he said, “What’s just? What’s right? What’s healing? Leave the land in better shape than we got it.”
Pedalling a modern stationary bicycle to produce electricity might be a great work-out, but in many cases, it is not sustainable. While humans are rather inefficient engines converting food into work, this is not the problem we want to address here; people have to move in order to stay healthy, so we might as well use that energy to operate machinery. The trouble is that the present approach to pedal power results in highly inefficient machines.
“Spain is now as forked as Ireland. It not only has all the problems of a crumbling paradigm–the religion of endless growth–but it has elevated the high priests of that paradigm to its seats of power.”
-Does engagement with Transition make people happier and healthier?
-The New-Economy Movement
-Liking Is for Cowards. Go for What Hurts.
Clearly wind power cannot immediately replace the energy we still must generate from the oil and gas produced on the outer continental shelf. But America’s unwillingness to clear the way for permitting a proven, commercially scalable, clean source of energy is a major black eye for a nation that purports to be a leader in technological development.
Most discussions of the future of electric power start from the assumption that maintaining a grid of the modern kind, designed from top to bottom around ample supplies of cheap fossil fuels, is the only option there is. It’s long past time to revisit that notion. Are our current ways of electricity production, distribution, and use merely the extravagant habits of a temporary age of excess, and what might an appropriate system for producing and using electricity look like in an age of scarcity?
