Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
So let us imagine that in fact, such a limitless source of energy does exist. Does it actually solve all our energy problems? Because this is a real and interesting and important question – and one many people believe to be the case. In fact, I would argue that the reason we need to talk about this is that the assumption that something being possible solves the problem is incredibly pervasive even among well educated people who ought to know better.
It is somewhat ironic that it was Keynes who said that politicians tend to be in the thrall of a defunct economist because his shade is haunting our council chambers at this budget-setting season, but sadly he is one of those ghosts that remains unseen and unheeded. John Maynard was a man with an aphorism for all seasons,and that most appropriate for today’s economy was his ‘paradox of thrift’.
May Day is a day of liberation — a day to be seized and celebrated, a day to remember who was shot down on it and who fought for it. It’s a day to join those who fought and fight for liberation, to imagine what its most delicious and profound possibilities might look like.
“As empires rise and fall and powerful nations grow and then contract, the farmers, the yeomen, the small landholders, the shopkeepers, and the local manufacturers keep on going. […] as often as not, they are sources of technological and cultural innovation and, from a sustainability perspective, they innovate largely in direct connection with the land and with each other.”
How can we reconnect when we are so deracinated, out of synch with the natural world, when the countryside is parcelled into properties, when the wild things are only allowed on reserves, or else live perpetually on the run? Transition breaks you out of your bubble. And whether this bubble is a fantasy about the earth as spiritual paradise, a view, a pleasure dome, it challenges us to be real about the place we utterly depend on to be alive.
-Fracking ‘Health Challenges’ to Be Examined by U.S. Advisers
-Restrict shale gas fracking to 600m from water supplies, says study
-Reporting of fracking and drilling violations weak
-Lancashire schoolgirl wins chance to address MEPs with anti-fracking video
-Chesapeake plugs blown Wyoming well
-Drillers May Frack First, Disclose Later Under Draft Plan
PCI Local Economies Fellow Michael Shuman joins Slow Money Founder and Chairman Woody Tasch to discuss the wide-ranging benefits of investing in local food systems.
Five forces have helped enable long-term economic growth, we are now reaching limits in all of them. Thus, while these factors have tended to create growth in the past, the same factors cannot be relied on to produce growth in the future. In fact, they may lead to a turn around in the not-too-distant future.
A weekly roundup of peak oil news, including:
-Oil and the global economy
-the Iranian confrontation
-Quote of the week
-Briefs
Here’s a crazy but true fact: negative externalities are the norm — not the exception — in our current economic setup. Failure to recognize this fact has created a wild divergence between theory and practice when it comes to managing harm caused by economic activity.
It appears as if organizers have gathered enough signatures to put an initiative on the November ballot in California which would require the labeling of genetically engineered foods. Of all the efforts to date to mandate such labeling, this initiative seems most likely to succeed in a state known for its health consciousness and its widespread organic agriculture (which doesn’t permit genetically engineered crops). But passage of the California initiative would almost certainly lead to a court battle as major producers of genetically engineered seeds seek to have the new law invalidated.
For nearly 25 years now, the idea that it might be possible to extract unlimited amounts of energy from the nucleus of a hydrogen atom at low temperatures has been pretty much in disrepute. When major laboratories were unable to detect nuclear reactions on their work benches back in 1989, the whole notion of what was then called “cold fusion” was debunked as junk science and for most remains so to this day. Fortunately however, a few scientists kept plugging away on just how one could get heat from the nucleus of a hydrogen atom. Now their efforts seem to be paying off.
