Year: 2011

Alternatives to Nihilism, Part Three: Remember Your Name

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Since the crisis of industrial society is being driven by social and economic habits that foster the extravagant use of energy and other resources, it would seem to be obvious that using much less of these things ought to be the foundation of any reasonable response. The fact that so many proposed responses advocate doing almost anything imaginable but using less energy and other resources points straight toward the tangled heart of contemporary nihilism, and suggests a way out.

There’s Something Happening Here…

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Put these things together — a tone of hopelessness in the mainstream progressive media, a largely useless outpouring of outrage in the indymedia, a giving up of citizens on the viability of centralized representative governments, reactionary responses to black swan events instead of constructive ones, the ratcheting up of existing systems to prolong the period before tipping points, and a naivete about the powerlessness of even the most powerful in modern complex systems — and what do we have?

First energy independence steps: A review of Crossing the Energy Divide, By R. Ayers and E. Ayers (2010)

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Crossing The Energy Divide by R. Ayers and E. Ayers, 2010, Wharton School Publishing, offers an engineering analysis to support a near-term solution to the problem of creating an alternative energy system for the U.S. This solution emphasizes making our fossil fuel energy use much more efficient and supports this position with Exergy as the basis for efficiency calculations. It recommends policy changes and a way to build a path to the renewable energy world.

National Wildlife Federation adopts key element of steady-state thinking

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The National Wildlife Federation held its annual meeting near Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. on Friday, April 15. The meeting took a bold, firm step toward implementing a key feature of steady-state economic thinking: it passed a resolution calling on the President, Congress, state governors and state legislators to abandon gross domestic product (GDP) as the indicator that economic policy makers seek to maximize, and to develop and adopt instead a broader measurement of economic and ecological well-being.

Walking for Water

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“You have to decide what it is you are going to stand for,” Day explains. “Water is essential to life. We live in the water of the womb of our mother before we come into the world. We are birthed from water, our bodies are primarily water and we can’t survive without clean water. At some time in your life you have to take a stand.”

Bringing economies down to earth

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What was so disturbing about the recent history of Iceland, and in this it merely represents a microcosm of the globalised economy, is the way that there needed to be no apparent connection between the size of the real economy and the size of the financial economy.

The dollar? We’ve got that sinking feeling…

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There is little doubt that a weak dollar is the “unofficial” policy of the Treasury and the Federal Reserve. Even as I write this, I can hear the feverish, fearful cries of the Dollar Collapsers, the Gold Bugs, the Hyperinflationistas, and many others calling out to me, telling me in no uncertain terms to buy gold, silver, oil, corn, wheat—anything with tangible value I can get my hands on. But like the vast majority of Americans, I am not in position financially to buy any of these things. I must use dollars. As CNBC tells me, if I don’t like a weak dollar, I might as well get used to it. Get used to it?

Global world product will not grow at 4%+ for five years

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You can see that the IMF is basically forecasting five years of pretty good growth – near the top of the historical range, but certainly not above it. They are not projecting any serious global slowdowns, still less an outright global recession (those are rare – 2009 was the only case in the last thirty years)…This requires the world come up with another 17mbd of supply in the next five years, though it only managed to come up with about 3-4mbd over the last five years, and that took a quadrupling of prices to achieve. I don’t see where this much oil can possibly come from.

San Francisco passes progressive urban agriculture policy

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This week, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors passed one of the most progressive pieces of legislation for urban agriculture in the nation. The new legislation has amended the zoning code to allow agricultural activities in all parts of the city, as well as defining the parameters by which urban agriculturists can sell their products.

Energy déjà vu: Obama must break with failed U.S. policies

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Despite soaring rhetoric and some promising proposals, President Obama is repeating the same mistakes that have doomed U.S. energy policy to failure for 40 years. Until Obama and Congress finally put a true price on the fossil fuels America consumes, the U.S. will continue its addiction to foreign oil and domestic coal.