Year: 2011

The peak oil crisis: 2012 – apocalypse now?

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A case can be made that some very bad things might be coming in the next year or so. There would seem to be two fundamental problems behind the coming upheavals. One is that we are running into constraints on resources and the other is that the OECD nations have simply accumulated so much debt that it is unlikely to ever be repaid.

No one ever thinks of the atmosphere’s ability to absorb and carry off carbon emissions as a resource, but as the world’s climate changes for the worse, that is exactly what it is. It could easily turn out over the course of the next 10 decades, that the atmosphere’s ability to absorb greenhouse gases turns out to be far more important than reserves of fossil fuels.

Tweedledoom and Tweedledee

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When peak oil comes up in conversation these days, some people insist that shale gas or algal biodiesel or some other technofix will take care of it (and so we don’t have to do anything), while others insist that the world as we know it is about to end in a sudden unstoppable collapse (and so we don’t have to do anything). To what extent does that common thread provide the driving force for both viewpoints? Glancing at the calendar–no, not the Mayan one, though that also plays a part–the Archdruid explains.

Can we manage without growth? An interview with Peter Victor. Part Two

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There are many possible futures out there. I think that what I see is a huge amount of resources in our economy, both in terms of capital equipment, intellectual effort, finance, being directed towards the growth agenda. A different agenda, a different ambition for our society and our economy away from the pursuit of growth, would automatically free up, at least in principle, a lot of these resources.

Can we manage without growth? An interview with Peter Victor. Part One

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I had the privilege recently of speaking with Peter Victor, Professor in Environmental Studies at York University and author of “Managing without growth”. At a time when the obsession with making our economies grow again is close to hysteria, Peter’s work asks the question as to whether economic growth is the best way to achieve what we want from a society; employment, happiness, good public services, increased equality and so on, and concludes we could have an economy that isn’t growing, but which is actually better at those things.

At last, a new story for the future

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We need to break the intellectual spell under which we live. The last few decades have been dominated by the premise that privatizing all economic resources will produce endless riches. Which was kind of true, except that the riches went to only a few people. And in the process they melted the Arctic, as well as dramatically increasing inequality around the world.

Jay Walljasper performs the greatest of services with the book All That We Share: A Field Guide to the Commons. It is—choose your metaphor—a bracing slap across the face or the kiss that breaks an enchantment. In either case, after reading it, you will be much more alive to the world as it actually is, not as it exists in the sweaty dreams of ideologues and economics professors.

Henry Red Cloud: Solar Warrior for Native America

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Henry Red Cloud’s address is 1001 Solar Warrior Road on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. But the road sign hasn’t arrived. A windmill towering over the cottonwoods in the draw of White Clay Creek marks the location of Red Cloud Renewable Energy Center and his “Solar Warrior Community.”

Land Rights and the Rush For Land Report (excerpt)

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Originated by the rising concerns expressed by many International Land Coalition (ILC) members in 2008, the Commercial Pressures on Land research project is intended to go beyond the large-scale land acquisitions phenomenon, focussing on the wider set of converging drivers for investment interest in land, such as rising food consumption and predicted long-term food prices rises; demand for feedstock for agrofuels; increasing commodity prices; carbon-trading mechanisms such as REDD; and rent seeking and speculation practices on land by recontextualising them within longer term trends.