Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Profits were up at the supermajors again in Q2 as high oil prices offset the rising cost of new production. Shell’s Peter Voser said that high prices were having an effect on demand for oil, especially in Europe – this could be seen reflected in flat UK growth figures and weak numbers even for major German manufacturing companies.
Commons reduce money-induced growth because they make us more independent of money. The more we produce commons, the less we or the state has to pay for goods.
Commons reduce population-induced growth because they are associated with a multiplicity of sufficiency strategies which create prosperity by sharing.
Commons escape the growth compulsion, because all those things that are produced as commons, do not have to be made artificially scarce. And there is no incentive for artificial scarcity because commons are not produced as goods to be exchanged but they foster and maintain social relationships, satisfy needs and solve problems. Directly.
Most people hardly noticed, but the recent Spanish elections have been troubled by a series of demonstrations. A relatively high number of demonstrators have gathered in major Spanish cities during the months of May and June, demanding radical but curiously unspecific changes in Spanish politics. There have been similar protests in Portugal and in Greece, all of them about the austerity measures taken in those countries in response to the debt crisis. Of course, the French far left has seen in these protests the premises of the revolution it has been waiting for throughout the last fifty years, but what strikes me most about those protests is their pointlessness and their conservative nature. In that, they may well be representative of the political climate of the early decades of energy descent.
Our nation needs to make a dramatic re-investment in broadening wealth and opportunity for Americans who have been historically left out of prosperity. Massive government investments of the past that helped reduce the income gap, such as the 19th Century Homestead Act and post-World War II veterans and housing benefits were effectively “whites only.” Since the end of legal discrimination in the 1960s, there has not been a similar mass investment in economic opportunity that African-Americans and other people of color could benefit from as equal citizens.
A midweekly roundup of peak oil news, including:
-Developments this week
-Japan
It was the fact that when we met up as a group in these public spaces something happened between us. Something we held in common. We understood implicitly what we were doing and why — sharing stuff, organising events, going through the agenda. When I looked at this working-together in the visioning it looked like an energy field, the kind of energy field you sense when you stand by a hive humming with bees. A hum of warmth and intelligence that allows people to naturally collaborate and make that low-energy downshift happen….You just need to tune in and act.
Many countries are facing dangerous water shortages. As world demand for food has soared, millions of farmers have drilled too many irrigation wells in efforts to expand their harvests. As a result, water tables are falling and wells are going dry in some 20 countries containing half the world’s people. The overpumping of aquifers for irrigation temporarily inflates food production, creating a food production bubble that bursts when the aquifer is depleted.
The trend of international land grabbing—when governments and private firms invest in or purchase large tracts of land in other countries for the purpose of agricultural production and export—can have serious environmental and social consequences, according to researchers at the Worldwatch Institute.
Just about every North American knows that we live as large as Las Vegas when it comes to consuming oil, electricity or natural gas. We are the world’s fattest and laziest energy consumers (and our growing corpulence reflects this bitter truth). But, hey, we can’t stop snacking, let alone employing more energy slaves.
All those poets who like to sing about the joyous wonders of birthing ought to try barnyard midwifery awhile. How many times I have looked up in the dark and wondered why there couldn’t be a better way. If nature or science or intelligent design is so smart, why can’t we just order calves and lambs from Sears?
When I use the words small, open, local and connected, this is my way of telling the story. People can tell it in another way, but the result is similar. Of course it’s a metaphor: having small entities that when connected, become bigger entities. It’s evident that it comes very strongly from the network. But once it appears, it’s not only related to what you can do, strictly speaking, in the network and technologies. It’s a way to imagine the way in which the social services are delivered in society and the way in which we can imagine economies that are at the same time rooted in a place and partially self-sufficient but connected to the others and open to the others.
There’s probably no notion more widespread in contemporary American culture than the claim that whatever the problems driving the widening spiral of crisis that afflicts us, they must be somebody’s fault. There’s probably no notion that would be more derided in contemporary American culture, if anyone were so unwise as to suggest it, than the proposal that the humanities might have something useful to offer as that spiral of crisis worsens. The acceptance of the one claim and the dismissal of the other are not as unrelated as they seem, and the thread of connection that unites them offers a glimpse at some of the crucial issues surrounding education in the age of peak oil.
