Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
World energy policy is gripped by a fallacy — the idea that coal is destined to stay cheap for decades to come. This assumption supports investment in "clean-coal" technology and trumps serious efforts to increase energy conservation and develop alternative energy sources. It is an important enough assumption about our energy future that it demands closer examination.
A midweekly roundup of peak oil news, including:
-Developments this week
-The IEA’s monthly report
Heat waves clearly can destroy crop harvests. The world saw high heat decimate Russian wheat in 2010. Crop ecologists have found that each 1-degree-Celsius rise in temperature above the optimum can reduce grain harvests by 10 percent. But the indirect effects of higher temperatures on our food supply are no less serious.
One of life’s mysteries for me is why country people have inevitably migrated to the cities in every civilization that I have studied. In the United States, where there has been little of the kind of violent upheavals that send third world countries into instability, the reasons for migration to cities seem especially specious to me.
If this world is to learn anything about the day-to-day realities of adapting to–and rejoicing in–the resources that living and eating in a more limited, more localized–and therefore often healthier and tastier–environment may provide, then we need more men like Leroy.
Coal still plays a dominant role in the U.S. energy mix, accounting for almost 45% of American electricity production. But the economics of coal continue to change, making the resource look far less attractive today than it once was.
If freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose, then revolution could be just another word for nothing left to eat.
The Carbon Tracker initiative is a new way of looking at the carbon emissions problem. It is focused on the fossil fuel reserves held by publically listed companies and the way they are valued and assessed by markets. Currently financial markets have an unlimited capacity to treat fossil fuel reserves as assets. As governments move to control carbon emissions, this market failure is creating systemic risks for institutional investors, notably the threat of fossil fuel assets becoming stranded as the shift to a low-carbon economy accelerates.
The economy is closely linked with the physical resources that underly it. Most economists assume debt can rise endlessly, just as they assume GDP can rise endlessly. But if there really is a limit that prevents oil supply from rising endlessly, it seems to me that there is also a corresponding limit that prevents debt from rising endlessly.
Non-violent direct action is not the most glamorous occupation in the world. Unpaid overtime, long hours, maligned by a biased mainstream media, widely misunderstood by the middle classes and opposed by a heavy state apparatus, who could be blamed for thinking environmental activism to be a mugs game. But when the audience at a London preview of “Just Do It: A Tale of Modern Day Outlaws” was asked if they had been inspired to take up direct action after watching the film, many hands waved in the air.
One thing I learned from plants, I said to Dan as we headed home to Suffolk and resumed our discussion about roadside herbs, is that whatever you experience in the company of the plant that is the medicine. What makes the medicine is the looking back on that experience afterwards, the dialogue you hold about it and the story you then tell the world. So after the whirlwind three days in Liverpool what is that story?
As Europe and the United States each engage in a classic game of chicken, using sovereign debt in place of more ordinary vehicles, the declining credit ratings of an assortment of governments have deep and subtle links to a more pervasive decline in the quality of goods and services available across the industrial world. The first stirrings of the salvage economy of the future offers one way to counter that process.
