Year: 2012

TaskRabbit: Running errands for fun and profit

by

Leah Busque, the founder and chief product officer at TaskRabbit, is a former IBM software engineer who started her company to solve a problem she had one very cold evening in Boston. She ran out of dog food at home and wished there was someone she could pay to run the errand. She thought: “it’s a simple problem, there should be a simple solution.” That was February 2008. She went online that evening, registered runmyerrand.com, quit her job at IBM four months later, and spent the next year building the initial service.

Hard Times: Nicole Foss

by

In Extraenvironmentalist #38 we talk about living in hard times with Nicole Foss of The Automatic Earth. Nicole tells us about the Canadian housing bubble and why the initial collapse might just be faster than the one America experienced in 2005. Seth and I ask about what life was like in the Great Depression and how the process of labor exploitation may continue into the near future. We ask Nicole if misunderstandings about economic collapse could have us preparing for the wrong thing.

Executive order – National defense resources preparedness

by

Last Friday, with little publicity, President Obama signed a national preparedness executive order that gives US government (USG) cabinet agencies the ability to exercise total control over what are essentially all the resources of the USA.

In my humble opinion, this could also be the USG’s way of telling us that it knows Peak Oil has arrived, and that the age of energy and resource scarcity has officially begun.
(suggested by an EB reader)

If only we had free energy

by

I thought I’d do a thought experiment. Suppose tomorrow morning a hypothetical university—let’s call it T.I.M.—sends out their weekly press release claiming a “revolutionary breakthrough” that will change the way we think about energy. Unlike every other time in the past decade they’ve made this claim, though, suppose this time it’s actually true: they’ve discovered a way of producing extremely cheap energy—as near to “free energy” as can be imagined.

The great, invisible brain wave in the sky

by

I am convinced that the seething cauldron of human thought boils up in the ethereal atmosphere of ideas, a process made more substantive now by electronic communication gone wild, and that more seemingly creative people have taller antennae jutting out from behind their ears to pick up on the latest notions and theories floating around in the great brain hovering over us.

Oil, politics, talk and reality- Mar 21

by

-Saudi Arabia Can Raise Output 25% If Needed, Naimi Says
-Tech Talk – Going Back to the First Look at Saudi Arabian Oil Production
-Saudi Arabia sends tankers to US with pledge to bring down oil price
-FACT CHECK: Does more US drilling ease gas pump pain? Math, history show that hasn’t happened
-Tapping Petroleum Reserve has gotten trickier
-US exempts Japan and EU nations from Iran oil sanctions

Space-Based Solar Power

by

A solar panel reaps only a small portion of its potential due to night, weather, and seasons, simultaneously introducing intermittency so that large-scale storage is required to make solar power work at a large scale. A perennial proposition for surmounting these impediments is that we launch solar collectors into space—where the sun always shines, clouds are impossible, and the tilt of the Earth’s axis is irrelevant.

Tackling inequality: a new role for the state

by

In the last thirty years, a rising share of the global economic pie has been colonised by the world’s rich. It is this concentration of income that is the real cause of the present crisis. It created the conditions for the 2008 Crash and is now driving us into an era of near-permanent slump.

MOSES Conference: Growing the next generation of farmers

by

Strength in numbers! More than 3,600 farmers strong gathered for the Midwest Organic and Sustainable Education Service (MOSES) conference in La Crosse, Wisconsin the last weekend in February, and it was an amazing experience. The conference featured keynotes by food policy expert Margaret Krome and Food Corps director Curt Ellis, a cornucopia of training opportunities focused on all aspects of organic farming, and a special “Young Organic Stewards” track for newcomers and beginning farmers with specialized workshops and social events.

Biodiversity in Kanazawa: Spring’s Lesson

by

The ecosystems around Kanazawa’s urban area have played an important role in giving shape to the physical form of the city in terms of its functionality and aesthetics, and in sustaining its lifestyles. The city’s rise as a flourishing cultural centre was made possible by the diversity of the surrounding ecosystems — from forests to freshwater, to plains and marine environments — which provided it with an abundance of resources and services. As the city’s space was being molded in response to climatic factors, and based on local socio-cultural categories, specific resource uses and practices for managing the biodiversity of these surrounding ecosystems emerged.

The Peak Oil Crisis: Parsing the Bakken

by

As we have seen with the Bakken and the various natural gas bearing shales we have been drilling of late, it takes an awful lot of expensive wells and environmental disruption to get the oil out. One estimate of the Energy Returned on Energy Investment (EROEI) for the Bakken shale suggests that the EROEI is six. This means that it may take one oil barrel’s worth of energy to produce six barrels of Bakken shale oil. This is getting very close to the theoretical point at which it really is not worth the effort and all the economic disruption.

The aspect of this “energy independence” story that the optimists continue to ignore is that, while oil production from shale may be climbing, depletion of our other sources of oil continues apace