Year: 2012

Bad knowledge and the promise of the university (response to Immanuel Wallerstein)

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In a recent blog-post sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein writes, “the universities were supposed to play the role of one major locus … of analysis of the realities of our world-system. It is such analyses that may make possible the successful navigation of the chaotic transition towards a new, and hopefully better, world order.”…Wallerstein has developed a world systems model of modernization and empire aimed at creating this better world. It is understandable that he mourns the docile, flaccid, opportunistic, and sometimes destructive contributions of the university as increasing social inequality, militarism, various forms of corruption, debt, unemployment, biophysical forces and natural resource scarcities are decimating human societies…Nonetheless, the historical precedent for such leadership from universities is to my knowledge non-existent.

The end of the world is at hand…

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It is always impossible to distinguish between weather and climate, and I’m not making any claims here, other than humorous ones about my laundry. It is hard for a gardener like me not to be gleeful in some measure – I have daffodils, warm dirt, tiny spinach leaves, baby rabbits, clean laundry – what’s not to love?…But just like there’s some vague part of me that worries when the laundry pile gets empty – it is nice, but not NORMAL at my house, it is hard to love with a whole heart this world, whether this warming is momentary or meaningful. The long term predictions for my place echo in my head – like Georgia, only drier, by the end of the century. If we aren’t having a Georgia spring, we are certainly having a Virginia one, and isn’t without consequence.

Deceptionomics

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I recently argued that today’s global marketplace is characterized by cheater economics — a corporate welfare system that has no part in a sustainable, steady state economy. There’s another type of economics that’s also in wide use today. It’s not quite as “in-your-face” as cheater economics, but it’s just as harmful because of the way it distorts reality. Deceptionomics uses “fool-you” accounting to omit genuine costs and misrepresent the true benefits and costs of economic transactions.

Strengthening Local Economies: Michael Shuman on Investing in Small Businesses – web event

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Not even 1 percent of Americans’ long-term savings are invested locally, largely because it’s just not possible under the current system. But what would our towns look like if a larger fraction of this $30 trillion were in local economies?

Carrying capacity dashboard for Australia is launched

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This online tool allows you to estimate the number of people a certain area in Australia may be able to support at a national, state and bio-regional scale. Our aim is to raise awareness of the importance of carrying capacity assessment as a forward planning tool – to help establish a sustainable balance between people and their localised environment. Given the dependence of societal systems on biophysical health, it is vital that land-use planning initiatives have the ability to more clearly define potential future demands on the environment. Carrying capacity assessment offers a way to assess our resource needs and also determine how best to meet these needs.

Peak Oil – (House of Representatives – February 17, 2012)

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Mr. Speaker, when I looked at the television this morning and at that little crawler across the top of one of our stations, I noticed that oil was $103 a barrel–$103 a barrel and we’re in a recession. What’s happening here?

Today, in spite of all that we have done in the most creative, innovative society in the world, the United States, today we produce half the oil that we did in 1970, and we’ve drilled more oil wells in our country than all the rest of the world put together.

Why Saudi and American bluffing won’t lower oil prices (Hint: It doesn’t work when people know you’re bluffing)

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If you have the power and the desire to bring down oil prices, the best way to proceed is to start bringing them down. The easiest and fastest method would be to make more supplies available to the world market and keep adding until you reach your target price. The less you say about what you are doing, the better. When market participants are filled with uncertainty about your intentions, they have only the direction of prices to guide them. That means the speculative players can help you achieve your goals more quickly as they panic out of their positions.

This was not, of course, the path chosen by the United States, Great Britain and Saudi Arabia recently when they announced that they were contemplating intervention in the oil markets–in the form of releases from strategic petroleum reserves in the case of the United States and Britain and in the form of increased production by Saudi Arabia.

The New York Times exaggerates the significance of shale oil

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The New York Times has shown that it is not concerned about Peak Oil. On 23 March it headed page 1 with an article that reminds us that since Nixon’s time every president has had the same goal of giving the USA “independence from foreign energy sources”. One can interpret the article as saying that the USA is now on the way to reaching this goal but let us compare some of the statements in the article to what the USA’s Energy Information Agency (EIA) says.

The map is not the territory

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This is the grove I come to each spring, first with the daffodils, and later with the bluebells and red campion. This is the season, between the Equinox and May Day, when England is her most green and exuberant. I love this spring moment. I love English marshes and Welsh hills, the deserts of Arizona, the valleys of Ecuador, the islands of Greece, the forests of Mexico. I have traversed many lands, sat with a thousand flowers and learned their medicine. I have climbed trees, swum in wild water, and spent a big part of my life immersed in the fabric of nature, trying to find words for the wild, the beautiful and the free . . .But what on earth has this got to do with Transition?

Reclaiming ‘common sense’: new pamphlet is a rallying cry to the 99%

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We are in revolutionary times in the specific sense that the governing orthodoxy that bounded what we understood to be practical and sensible turned out to be complete delirium. The analogies with the situation in revolutionary America seem very strong and unforced.