Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
With a freaky round of natural disasters hitting an ever shakier economy, more and more people are starting to prepare for disasters natural and manmade. The obvious place to begin: storing food. You don’t have to be a total doomer to start collecting cans and dry food down in the basement. You just have to care about making your family more resilient. Start by learning from the experts: Mormons and survivalists. And don’t count out FEMA.
(Social-democrat Helle Thorning-Schmidt was just elected Denmark’s first female prime minister.)
Often visitors to Denmark express respect for our wind mills and green initiatives. Our country is mentioned in documentaries and international news for our sustainable solutions and bicyclists. The truth is, for the past ten years we have been showing off efforts of the Social Democratic 1990s. Since then Denmark has been left behind by other Scandinavian and European countries on being green.
But with the new elections Denmark is now back among the most ambitious of nations. And the first half of 2012 the new Danish government will hold Presidency of the Council of the European Union. So, see you in a second, green Europe.
“The Quest” lacks the magisterial quality of Yergin’s earlier book,”The Prize,”, a meticulously researched, groundbreaking history that chronicled how the major events of the 20th century — both world wars, for instance — pivoted on oil, and delivered deeply etched personality portraits of those who counted. “The Quest” by comparison is a primer, based largely on other people’s books and articles, and does not attempt to tackle history on a similar scale, nor to introduce the actors in three dimensions.
More than two decades after the Brundtland Report, it’s past time to abandon this linguistic sleight of hand and rally around a new, shocking but this time realistic slogan: sustainable shrinkage! Within this new perspective, we can get on with saving species, restoring wastelands, improving efficiency, putting our life-support systems on sustainable bases—in short, finding solutions. But we’ll do so with a new urgency and clarity, conscious that if we are to survive on our little planet in some reasonably civilized way, human activity (and its impacts) must shrink. If we don’t shrink it, Gaia will shrink it for us, catastrophically.
(Ernest Callenbach is author of the prescient novel Ecotopia.)
– Divided we fall (coalition politics)
– Gender and the city (“Peak Male”)
– What is resilience?
– Peter Singer: Can We Increase Gross National Happiness?
The current maelstrom in the financial world is not a discrete event. Our attitude in general about risk, especially low-probability, hidden risk, is similar to that of the man who sleeps on the railroad tracks but does not know about the existence of trains. Much of the time he can sleep there undisturbed. But he need only be wrong once in his timing to suffer catastrophe.
Carsort.com has put together an informative infographic on Peak Oil:
– Look at oil consumption vs demand
– Where oil comes from
– What we use oil for – What is peak oil
– Oil we have left as well as where we go from here
– NYT: Vegetable Gardens Are Booming in a Fallow Economy
РFrances Moore Lapp̩: The Food Movement: Its Power and Possibilities
– Peak Phosphate
– Eric Schlosser: It’s Not Just About Food
One way or another, most philanthropy and social change efforts assume a growing economy. But what if that assumption no longer holds?
Yergin: "Things don’t stand still in the energy industry. With the passage of time, unconventional sources of oil, in all their variety, become a familiar part of the world’s petroleum supply. They help to explain why the plateau continues to recede into the horizon—and why, on a global view, Hubbert’s Peak is still not in sight."
Brown: "Contrary to Mr. Yergin’s assertion that advocates of Peak Oil have been wrong at every turn, six years of annual global production data show flat to declining crude oil and total petroleum liquids production data. … I suspect that just as Mr. Yergin was perfectly wrong about oil prices, he may be confidently calling for decades of rising production, just as we come off the current production plateau and just as an accelerating decline in Global Net Exports kicks in."
Social-democracy had its apogee in the period 1945 to the late 1960s. At that time, it represented an ideology and a movement that stood for the use of state resources to ensure some redistribution to the majority of the population in various concrete ways: expansion of educational and health facilities; guarantees of lifelong income levels by programs to support the needs of the non-“wage-employed” groups, particularly children and seniors; and programs to minimize unemployment. Social-democracy promised an ever-better future for future generations, a sort of permanent rising level of national and family incomes. This was called the welfare state. It was an ideology that reflected the view that capitalism could be “reformed” and acquire a more human face. … The social-democratic solution has become an illusion. The question is what will replace it for the vast majority of the world’s populations.
Humans seem to be reaching a new bottleneckrelated to oil limits and financial crises that grow out of these oil limits, with the current example being the European Debt Crisis. Depending how this and other debt crises work out, it seems possible that human population will decline. If this should happen, it could lead to a reduced problem with species extinction.
