Year: 2011

A real chance to cut subsidies to Big Oil?

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Oil subsidies of nearly $40 billion will be on the block if Democrats have their way. And though the GOP and the industry claim cutting the handouts will cost American jobs, a former Shell CEO says that when prices are high enough, Big Oil doesn’t need help. What’s for sure is that, to have any hope of getting America prepared for peak oil, we’ll need an energy policy that stops encouraging people to use more of the oil that we’re already running out of.

Heating With Wood Is An Eco-Crime?

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Even as I write this, Wendell Berry and other courageous people have emerged victorious after protesting to the governor of Kentucky about mountaintop removal. The governor wouldn’t speak to them, so they staged a sit-in in his office, risking arrest, until he did meet them. I should have been with him. I don’t have the courage or the patience. My way of protest is sneakier. I just fire up the wood stove.

Riches-to-rags – Our fashionable stories of stuff

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Sometimes l think about the clothes I used to own and it shocks me that I remember my wardrobe more intimately, more joyfully than I remember my friends of that time. The question I ask myself now is: is this because we were damned, fallen angels trapped in the colourful lures of the material world, or is it because our relationship with matter, with the fabric of the earth, has never been truly celebrated or understood? Or is it that our letting go of Stuff, our powerdown, has become the most urgent and most interesting story of our times?

Energy: What really matters

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Current discussions of renewable energy resources often fixate on finding replacements for the highly concentrated fossil fuels and abundant electricity that plays so large a role in contemporary lifestyles in the industrial world. The forms of energy that are actually required to maintain a comfortable human life, by contrast, are food and relatively diffuse heat for cooking, water heating and space heating, and these latter are much easier for individuals to provide for themselves using renewable resources. Moving away from dependence on concentrated energy, however, requires certain adjustments — one of which involves facility with a caulk gun.

Year one of the global commons movement

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Whatever we do, whatever we produce – we need common pool resources. So, the very question we have to answer is: What do we want to do with them? Do we want to produce commodities and convert everything – our collective knowledge, our genes, solar energy, public arenas and spaces, water, beaches, social care, etc. – into commodities? Or do we want to sustain and reproduce them as commons? It’s our choice.

Peak Moment 189: Menu for the future: bringing famers to the table

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What happens if you create 25 small groups to discuss food values and issues, and include a local farmer or food producer in each one? Innovative organizers Judy Alexander, Dick Bergeron and Peter Bates facilitated the “Menu for the Future” groups to support local farmers and educate eaters. Results? Eaters changed their food choices, and the market for local food products expanded. Winners all around!

Eventually we’ll have unlimited cheap clean energy. But that will not help us or our kids.

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Summary: Optimists about energy give glowing forecasts of new technologies, often with wildly underestimated estimates of when when these can generate substantial fractions of our energy. In the real world technologies take decades to evolve from the laboratory to commercialization. And then building new energy sources on a large scale takes decades. Here we sketch out realistic timelines.

Mink River

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Mink River is simply the best novel I have read in a decade. It is brilliantly and painstakingly crafted. It tells a wonderful and heart-warming story. It never manipulates. Its prose is pure poetry: Every word counts. Its characters are so contemporary and complex and familiar that they spring to life. And its message — about cultural transition driven by necessity, about the importance of community and of place and of resilience and of love — is essential and delivered with a power and richness that no non-fictional account could hope to match.

Lentils and justice for all

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Food justice is about ensuring access to healthy, quality food for all people, no matter their economic position. Ahmadi and Reverend Jeffrey sat down with YES! to explain how a total reorientation of the food system can support community health and wealth—planting local businesses, creating jobs, and growing a public understanding about why our current paradigm fails us all, especially those in the most need.

Earth’s Limits: Why Growth Won’t Return

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The 2008 crude oil price, $147 per barrel, shattered the global economy. The “invisible hand” of economics became the invisible fist, pounding down world economic growth to match the limitations of crude oil production.—Kenneth Deffeyes (petroleum geologist). An excerpt from Chapter 3 of Richard Heinberg’s upcoming book The End of Growth.

Desperately seeking “hozho”

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Hozho enfolds a concept that we westerners vehemently and vocally reject: inevitability. We are the people of the fabled “fat lady”—nothing is over till she sings, and even then we hold out hope that game officials will reverse the call on further review and deliver a last-minute miraculous victory for our side. The idea that things just “are the way they are”, no matter what we do, goes against our ingrained, up-by-our-boot-straps belief that we are the masters of our fate. If something ain’t right it’s just because we haven’t fixed it yet. We only need to think harder, work longer, swear louder—and, by God, beat some balance back into this thing.