Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
All is not rosy in global cities where inequalities reach record levels and put such cities at risk. There may consequently be more cycles of disorder and violence if the financial and economic sectors continue to dominate the cities’ agendas.
A midweekly roundup of peak oil news, including:
-Development this week
-Wikileaks
Which is all just a reminder of how seed starting, as most of us do it, is a heavily energy intensive process. It can involve lights, heating mats, plastic containers, lots of purchased seed starting mixes and various liquid substances that make your house smell vaguely of rotting fish for a week after you use them. All of these substances have to be transported to you. How do you get along without all those things, either if you have to or if you want to? How do you use less of them, at least?
-The Guardian, Wikileaks cables and oil production in Saudi Arabia
-Saudi Reserves
-What did we learn from the Saudi cables?
-Saudi Oil Production and Reserves – Reasons Behind Wikileaks Concerns
Can events in complex systems ever be predicted? No…and yes.
Why is the community ownership of assets important? Why does it matter that the community is able to own its own assets?
The only way that biomass achieves carbon neutrality is if growing forests sequester — that is, absorb from the atmosphere — as much or more carbon dioxide than is released in the burning process…It takes only seconds to burn a tree’s worth of wood, and decades for that tree to grow back and sequester the same amount of carbon.
In India and around the world, secure land rights provide a source of food and income, empowering families and communities with stability, dignity, and hope.
The fact that record numbers of people are coming to the meetings of insurgent garden-farm groups all over is sweet music to those of us who have been part of this revolution from the beginning.
-BG warns over demand for gas
-Don’t Count on Natural Gas to Solve US Energy Problems
-Chesapeake’s move brings cheer to gloomy US gas sector
A senior Saudi Arabian oil official said in 2007 that the kingdom has 388 billion barrels of recoverable crude oil reserves, about 45 percent more than official public estimates. But about the same time, a retired Saudi Aramco executive met with U.S. diplomats in Dhahran, and asserted that Saudi figures in general are wildly overblown, and that his country is headed for a production peak around 2020, followed by a slow decline, according to new Wikileaks cables. The issue is pivotal.
The recent report from World Wildlife Fund insisting that the world can transition to renewable energy while maintaining current developed world lifestyles and abolishing Third World poverty is simply one more in a long series of loudly heralded cornucopian fantasies well detached from the hard realities of the industrial world’s predicament. The sheer amounts of cheap energy that modern civilization has to hand has blinded too many people to the fact that “vast” and “infinite” are not synonyms — and that blindness has significant implications for the near future.
