Year: 2011

Energy dysfunction – April 21

by

– Oil sands investments by state-owned bank ‘not sound’, say UK greens
– Multinational fossil fuel firms use ‘biased’ study in massive lobbying push for gas
– Really Unpopular Complicated Expensive Technological Solutions For A Nonexistent Problem
– The Big Grab: 9-part series on the economic threats to Canadians posed by the Alberta oil sands

It’s time to outlaw land grabbing, not to make it “responsible”!

by

Today’s farmland grabs are moving fast. Contracts are getting signed, bulldozers are hitting the ground, land is being aggressively fenced off and local people are getting kicked off their territories with devastating consequences. While precise details are hard to come by, it is clear that at least 50 million hectares of good agricultural land – enough to feed 50 million families in India – have been transferred from farmers to corporations in the last few years alone, and each day more investors join the rush.

Communicating energy issues: a psychological perspective

by

It’s tough to convince people that there is a need for radical change of their attitudes and behavior in relation to energy issues. Cognitive mechanisms that produce beneficial results under most circumstances can lead to an irrational resistance (if not immunity) to any kind of argument aimed at our own set of beliefs about peaking global oil production, renewable energy resources, and the continued viability of nuclear power.

The Fukushima disaster and other irreproducible experiments

by

The situation at the Fukushima nuclear reactors has evolved to one of chronic catastrophe or, more optimistically, feed and bleed followed by dialysis. While we keep getting reassured that the Fukushima crisis is not as severe as Chernobyl, I will instead look a few years further back in an effort to learn something about the present dilemma. Fukushima should be more comparable to the Three Mile Island meltdown in 1979 than Chernobyl, but it has apparently left the former eating its radioactive dust. Why? Can anything be learned from this?

Peak oil, nuclear power and the ecolonomics of existential material reality

by

“Whoever fights with monsters should see to it that he does not become one himself. And when you stare for a long time into an abyss, the abyss stares back into you.” Nietzsche’s words are so apt to describe the current debate within environmentalism over nuclear power, ever since, last month, George Monbiot said that nuclear power was OK. Like the taxing effects of dealing with the peak oil issue, staring into the “abyss” of the effects of catastrophic radiation contamination can be equally taxing on the soul.

Tired of Tires

by

…on my little one horse farm, there are 40 tires in use, not counting the ones on the car. And ten percent of them are flat at any given time. This is partly because most of my tires were vulcanized in the late Middle Ages or thereabouts. But it is also because there is something unsustainable and unnatural about riding around on air wrapped in a substance that comes from trees that grow half a million miles away.