Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
– CERA-week: Total’s Upstream Chief Says Peak Oil Is Around The Corner
– CERA Energy Conference: Oil Industry Giddy With New Discoveries
– Michael Klare: America’s Fossil Fuel Fever
– Nader: Obama Can Do More on Oil Prices
– Dr. Colin Campbell: Playing with Fire
– Peak todo (Spanish – peak everything)
This time around, Europe, and in particular the Eurozone, is the area of the world getting hit the hardest by high oil prices. Part of this has to do with the relative level of the Euro and the US dollar.
In the end, it may not matter which countries were first and most affected by limited oil supply and high oil prices. It will be all of us that feel the impact.
My personal journey into home energy reduction began with taking stock of past energy use as reported on my utility bills. I quickly migrated toward reading the meters directly to gauge the impact of particular activities. What I learned from our gas meter shocked me, and ultimately led to our single-biggest energy-saving behavioral shift. I’ve already ruined any hope of suspense in the title of the post, but just how bad does something have to be before I’ll resort to a word like “evil? And how bad are your own demons? Ah—now you can’t wait to find out!
-Sun, sewage and algae: a recipe for success?
-One of Largest Wind Farms Built in Ohio
-‘Germans Are Willing to Pay’ for Renewable Energies- Interview
-Wadebridge, the UK’s first solar-powered town – video
-Packing some power
-Controversial renewable energy report branded ‘shoddy nonsense’
Farmers like to sing while they work because they think no one can hear them. They especially like to sing on the tractor where the motor noise improves their singing by drowning out the raw edges of their voices. They also think the motor drowns out their renditions from the neighbors’ ears but just the opposite is true. Their hearty wails carry better than the motor noise and scare cows and neighbors several hundred acres downwind.
Occupy and the direct action movements of today have much in common with the radical movements of the 1960s/70s. Both stress cultural as well as economic and political equality and insist on the possibilities of self-government. Can the new generation move beyond the successes and failures of the past, to develop an alternative political economy?
In the classic game Risk, your goal is to dominate your rival players by killing them off and conquering their territories until your Empire stretches across the globe. In Monopoly, the “world’s favorite family game brand” (according to publisher Parker Brothers), your goal is to dominate your rival players through economic obliteration until they are penniless while you literally own everything. In a way, the combination of Risk and Monopoly perfectly mirror two of the most destructive pillars of our society: runaway capitalism and unflinching imperialism.
Laurence Schechtman is the founder and coordinator for Neighborhood Vegetables in the San Francisco East Bay, which he started four and a half years ago. Neighborhood Vegetables is a grassroots network of 2,500 volunteers who help each other plant urban vegetable gardens in their yards.
The city of Boulder, Colo., has won the right to take its power supply—and carbon emissions—away from corporate control. The change for Boulder came in November when voters passed two ballot measures that allow the city to begin the process of forming its own municipal power utility.
-Rolling Stone Responds to Chesapeake Energy on ‘The Fracking Bubble’
-Why Not Frack? – Book & Film review
-Fracking: The New Global Water Crisis – Report
-Kept in Dark by BC’s Oil and Gas Commission
-A Fresh Scientific Defense of the Merits of Moving from Coal to Shale Gas
I hastened to buy Local Dollars, Local Sense by Michael Shuman, because I was attracted to the title and had high hopes for the emphasis on localization. Shuman’s book represents a small step in a needed direction, but I was yearning for much deeper.
I’ve returned from a sobering United Nations-led tour of six tsunami-damaged communities and two radiation-impacted cities in Northern Japan. The obvious conclusion: the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident is forcing Japan to go green, including the launch of a new renewable energy national feed-in tariff that starts in July. Meanwhile the governor of Fukushima, Yuhei Sato, told us that renewables will be the “key factor” in the revival of his cesium-laden prefecture.
