Year: 2011

Tetsunari Iida on the renewable future of Japan

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It is clear that moving towards renewables is about more than simply adding more wind turbines and solar panels, but rather it is about a significant system re-think. For instance, one important measure would be to make the national power grid independent from the ten major electricity supply companies. That way anyone can set up their own electricity supply company and the current monopolistic structures would give way to a more diverse system.

Are food prices too high or not high enough?

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Not one mention was made of the best way to be farming this year: letting the animals graze for their food as they turn untilled pasture into meat, milk and eggs. It has been so wet that you did dare put cows on some pastures some days but, on the whole, pasture farmers are happy with all this rain: we could graze twice as many animals as normal.

Fleeing Vesuvius: The psychological roots of resource over-consumption

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Humans have an innate need for status and for novelty in their lives. Unfortunately, the modern world has adopted very energy- and resource-intensive ways of meeting those needs. Other ways are going to have to be found as part of the move to a more sustainable world.

Hair Shirts, Hypocrisy, and Wilkins Micawber

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These days, the idea that using less energy and resources might be a viable and indeed a necessary part of navigating the crisis of industrial society too often runs afoul of the hangover of America’s Puritan heritage; too often, that concept has been wielded in the service of fashionable hypocrisy, or turned into an ostentatious display of hair-shirt asceticism. Still, approached in the right way, using less — or, more exactly, using L.E.S.S. — is a crucial step in the direction of sustainability. With the help of W.C. Fields, the Archdruid explains.

Will the UK abandon its climate targets?

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The evidence of this fight at the very heart of government makes it clear that climate change emerges from a structural problem within the capitalist economic system, as green economists have long argued. Both sides in this current spat are right: we must have CO2 emissions, but we cannot have CO2 emissions. The only was to resolve this apparent impasse is to ditch the 19th-century economic paradigm we are still suffering for the ideas of green economics that Caroline Lucas has called ‘the economic paradigm for the 21st century’.

On the khaki market: What do you do when the food system you need is illegal?

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What do you get when you cross Green, as in Green Markets – those emergent farmer’s and craftspeople’s markets that have given life to local food – with Black or Grey Markets – ie, illegal sales? Khaki is the color you get, and you get what I call “Khaki Markets” – the growing trend towards producing food, toiletries and other regulated substances outside of regulation.

Methane in well water from gas fracking

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Many of you may have seen this kind of video, showing the effects of methane in drinking water near some shale gas extraction wells: Before now, I’ve never known what to make of this kind of thing. Is this a very rare, if spectacular occurence, or is it common where shale gas drilling goes on? Now, there is a paper in this weeks PNAS, Methane contamination of drinking water accompanying gas-well drilling and hydraulic fracturing by Osborn et al, researchers at Duke University. It appears to answer the question, and the answer is not good.

Good news on the right to food

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Those of us advocating for changes in global and national policies on food and agriculture just got some good news. The UN Human Rights Council just renewed for another three years the mandate of Olivier De Schutter as the UN’s Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food. If you haven’t followed De Schutter’s work since the 2007-8 food price spikes brought renewed attention to the issues of hunger and agricultural development, he has been a clear and uncompromising voice for change. His rights-based approach has taken him well beyond the withering rise of hunger to the roots of the global crisis, linking climate change, agribusiness concentration, commodity speculation, and the ongoing debates of industrial versus agro-ecological development.