Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Although there obviously will be many problems buried in the details of a proposal as broad and comprehensive as this one, the basic idea of seeing that every person is given equal access to enough energy to survive (warmth, cooking fuel) is a noble one. It is well worth the costs in terms of avoided civil unrest if people come to believe that declining amounts of fossil energy is being allocated fairly.
The advantages of aerial cargo ropeways are so numerous that it is no surprise that they are – slowly – being rediscovered. Worries about global warming, peak oil and environmental degradation have made the technology even more appealling. This does not only concern energy use: contrary to a road or a railroad track, a cargo ropeway can be built straight through nature without harming animal and plant life (or, potentially, straight through a city without harming human life). Traffic congestion also plays into the hands of cableways, because the service is entirely free from interference with surface traffic.
Many people believe the State of the Union is just political theater. While it’s true the speech last night was thin on specifics, one thing that was very specific was that Obama says he wants to cut subsidies to oil companies and give the money to clean energy instead. But everybody knows Big Oil controls Washington. Does this proposal have any chance at all? And what about the future of clean energy in a down economy with a glaring national debt?
Human societies, like individuals, can still be undone by their own tendency to do whatever has worked (or seemed to work) past the point where it’s simply not working.
Jared Flesher’s film The Farmer and the Horse is a joy, an absolutely fascinating immersion into the world of three people who have fallen in love with working with horses. In a world where the production of food is hugely dependent on the availability of cheap liquid fuels and where, in the UK, the average age of farmers is 58, this film follows 3 young people trying to get into agriculture in New Jersey in the US, each of whom has a passion for working with horses.
The sheer scale of our dependency on nonrenewable, energy-dense "fossilized sunshine" is often lost on those who believe that renewable energy sources can supplant hydrocarbons at anything like today’s level of energy consuption. Thus it is prudent to examine the prognosis for fossil fuels within North America, as they will make up the bulk of our energy consuption for many decades to come…
Gardeners like to compete with each other over who has the worst soil. You wouldn’t think we’d be proud of this, but what can I say, we’re a strange bunch. One will argue for his hard clay, baked in the sun, another for her sand, without a trace of organic matter. I’ve got my own candidate for the worst soil ever – the stuff in the beds around my house.
For millennia, the indigenous peoples of Russia, northern Scandinavia, and North America—the Inuits, Aleuts, Athabaskans, and Gwich’in, among others—have endured environmental and climatic change. But recent anthropogenic climate change may be their most formidable challenge of all. In the past few decades, Arctic average temperatures have risen at almost twice the rate as in the rest of the world (and in some areas, like Alaska, annual average temperatures are rising at five times the global rates). Sea level is rising, the ice is thinning, and the ranges and availability of the seals, whales, caribou, and fish that have sustained northern cultures are changing.
Chicken Tractor Version 1.0 was damaged enough to warrant building an entirely new portable coop. So I broke out the long list of change ideas I had been collecting and designed a new tractor.
For public health professionals, peak oil is significant because it will affect what are commonly called the social, environmental and economic determinants of health. For example, it will significantly affect, and require some reorganization of, our economic, transportation, and food systems. It is also important to public health professionals because it will very likely affect how health services are organized (the use of products and services dependent on petroleum permeates our health care system).
I believe in eating local, nutritious foods. It is relatively easy to do this with vegetables, eggs and dairy products but buying bread that I feel good about is much more challenging. This past summer, during the Our Daily Bread Course, I learned more about why buying local healthy bread is very difficult because bread is a highly processed product by its very nature.
Rising food prices leading to riots, protests, and revolts, mounting oil prices, mammoth worldwide unemployment, and a collapsed recovery — it looks like the perfect set of preconditions for a global tsunami of instability and turmoil. Events in Algeria and Tunisia give us just an inkling of what this maelstrom might look like, but where and how it will next erupt, and in what form, is anyone’s guess.
