Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
– Q&A: What’s Going on With Gasoline Prices?
– Chris Nelder: A model of oil prices
– Facing the Facts on Fossil Fuel (series from the former president of Academy of Science and the Royal Society of Canada
– A Dynamic Function for EROI
– Monbiot: Too many deer for too few people – a self-defeating study of the Highlands
– Perspectives on Limits to Growth: Challenges to Building a Sustainable Planet (online video of Smithsonian conference)
– Causes (animated video that explains it all)
– Guy McPherson’s TEDx talks in Tempe, Arizona
The energy markets have been shaken by the instability of Middle East oil and the vulnerability of nuclear power. Against the backdrop of European crisis and and high U.S. unemployment, what does this changing energy landscape mean for national and global economies in 2012? Daniel Lerch presents as part of the Great Decisions Series of the World Affairs Council of Oregon, January 2012.
Dr. John Mashey investigates the right-wing billionaires & corporations who pay alleged “charities”, bloggers, and old weathermen to deny climate science. Then Canadian journalist Margaret Munro on government muzzling scientists, plus an update from Union of Concerned Scientists Francesca Grifo on science freedom in U.S.
For many months, U.S. Energy Secretary Chu, the guy with the Nobel Prize in physics, has been running around the country telling audiences that big breakthroughs were coming for electric vehicles. Well, this week the other shoe dropped when an announcement was made of an advance in battery technology that has the potential to change the motor vehicle industry as we know it.
A midweekly roundup of peak oil news, including:
-Developments this week
For the last several years I’ve been working on the invention of “Urban and Suburban Right-to-Farm Laws” and have had some notable successes including a legal conference on the idea and a few municipalities that have implemented them. This is one of the reasons I think this is so incredibly important – zoning presumptions simply can’t be allowed to prevent people from using less and meeting their own needs.
Here in northern California gasoline is now retailing for $4.20 a gallon. Prices haven’t been this high since mid-2008. Forecasts for $5 per gallon gas in the US this summer are now commonplace. What’s driving prices up?
OrganicLea stands out as an inspiring urban food project that grows everything: food and communities. While many sustainable and food-focused programs are limited by the fact they only have volunteer staff, Organic Lea’s vision to create jobs provides a practical transition from hobby radicals to “professional radicals”. If the food sector and organics are not automatically a promotion of equality, inclusion, mutual aid, and cooperation, then OrganicLea definitely is.
One concern is how import-dependent Japan might cope with the advent of the peak of oil production and a possible oil price crunch. Paul Stevens at Chatham House, one of the world’s leading think tanks, argued in 2008 that an oil crunch could occur when the oil price goes over US$200 per barrel with severe macro-economic impacts….While other reports place the peak of world oil production at a later date between 2015 and 2020, the timing is academic when considered in the context of whether Japan would have the time to respond effectively in terms of reorganizing its entire food system.
Neoclassical economists, having worked hard to convince the world that everything was hunky-dory circa 2005, and concurrently having invented the rationales and the theories behind the financial time bombs that went off across the landscape, don’t seem to have suffered one whit for the subsequent sequence of events, a slow-motion train wreck that one might reasonably have expected would have rubbished the credibility of lesser mortals.
In recent years African countries have enjoyed interest from abroad, thanks in part to a great amount of available land apparently ideal for cultivating crops for providing food security and for the production of biofuels. However, insufficient legal protection for the local population often leads to the signing of contracts that deprive these people of their source of subsistence…And if the locals are in fact consulted at all on the matter, they can typically count on a campaign of misinformation from the government.
