Year: 2012

Jeffrey Brown responds to “U.S. energy independence is no longer just a pipe dream”

by

“It’s no pipe dream. The U.S. is already the world’s fastest-growing oil and natural gas producer. Counting the output from Canada and Mexico, North America is “the new Middle East,” Citigroup analysts declare in a recent report.”

Jeffrey Brown responds: The Texas Railroad Commission (RRC) sums the reported production from Texas producers, and it has been doing so far decades, while the EIA apparently uses a sampling approach to estimate Texas production. For annual production in 2011, the RRC shows Texas crude oil production at 1.12 mbpd (million barrels per day), while the EIA shows it at 1.46 mbpd, a gap of 340,000 bpd. The gap between the RRC and the EIA for monthly production is even more pronounced, on the order of about 500,000 to 600,000 bpd.

If the EIA is this far off for Texas, what about the other producing states, and what does it say about the EIA’s global data?

Back to the Land for the Occupy Movement

by

In the scant three weeks that Occupy the Farm persisted as a physical occupation, it expanded the tactics, objectives, and vision of the Occupy Movement; it restored the frontlines of a local struggle to get the University of California to respond to community needs rather than corporate interests; it took an issue that is generally only spoken of in the so-called ‘Third World’ – that of food sovereignty and territorial rights – and dropped it into the heart of the urban San Francisco Bay Area; and, it asserted, in the flesh, a demand that many progressives have spoken of in recent years, but few have had sufficient vision, understanding or bravery to manifest: Occupy the Farm was, and is, a bold, largely unprecedented act of reclaiming the Commons in the most immediate sense – taking land out of private speculation and putting it into community use.

When the experiment fails

by

Celebrating Failure is perhaps the least understood ingredient in the book. Because we live in a culture of success. No matter how we talk about losing being part of the game, it’s still losing. Victors take all, stand on the podium crowned with laurels, king of the castle, biggest banker on the block. No one wants to be in the beaten team, on the bottom of the pecking order. But to be in Transition means we have to understand this win-or-lose mindset as an old order we need to transform.

Resilience or death: Preparing our farms for the end of agriculture (…as we know it)

by

No civilization has ever faced the agricultural challenges confronting us over the coming decades. Ever. And if we can pull it off – wherever we CAN pull it off – it will necessarily be with an agriculture of maximum resilience; an agriculture that can get knocked down and stagger back up again and again and again. So let’s do this.

U.S. coal generation drops 19 percent in one year, leaving coal with 36 percent share of electricity

by

Power generation from coal is falling quickly. According to new figures from the U.S. Energy Information Administration, coal made up 36 percent of U.S. electricity in the first quarter of 2012 — down from 44.6 percent in the first quarter of 2011. That stunning drop, which represented almost a 20 percent decline in coal generation over the last year, was primarily due to low natural gas prices. As EIA explains, natural gas generation will climb steadily this year, while coal will see a double-digit drop by the end of 2012…

How to start a tool library

by

Though it seems like a relatively unique idea, around 40 community tool libraries already exist throughout the United States, from Philadelphia to Seattle and south to Oakland and New Orleans. Each has its own unique flavor but most operate roughly the same way by accepting tool donations from the community and then lending those tools out for free–or nearly free–to anyone capable of presenting an ID and signing a waiver. Through that basic setup, some tool libraries have been happily participating in the sharing economy for over 20 years.

Free energy does not occur in nature

by

It’s not just that what we generally think of as free energy doesn’t occur in nature, but also that free energy does occur in the everyday lived environments of people in industrial nations, which we might thus say are unnatural. So what are instances of free energy that we experience in our lives, and why do they matter?

Tom Murphy: Time to be honest with ourselves about our looming energy risks

by

Tom uses simple, easy-to-understand math — yes, that four-letter word — to logically — I say quite logically — make the case that simply extrapolating past trends in energy and economic growth is not going to cut it. Instead, we face gigantic challenges and significant risks to our current model. Not least of which is, when asked what we will use when fossil fuels dwindle away, the most typical answer is I’m sure we will think of something. That is, our future of energy is a question mark right now.

Urban agriculture isn’t new

by

In fact, it’s been around since 3,500 BC when Mesopotamian farmers began setting aside plots in their growing cities. In a review of urban agriculture throughout modern history at a symposium at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, D.C., a diverse set of academics and designers ranging from historians to landscape architects discussed how the practice has evolved over the ages, often been highly ideological, and continues to be loaded with meaning. Organized by professor Dorothee Imbert, ASLA, chair of the master’s of landscape architecture program at Washington University in St. Louis, the conference looked at why urban agriculture is such a hot topic among the public and designers now but also hoped to put the current interest in a broader context. As Imbert said, “the inter-relationship between food and the city has a long history.”

The Social Factor in Sustainable Architecture

by

I was recently struck by photographs of energy-efficient houses that were described as ’sustainable’ — built mostly with natural or recycled materials and even finished with environmentally friendly paint — however, they looked like regular modernist buildings. Can modernist architecture be called sustainable, if only ecological techniques are used? Or, is there still something missing?