Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
– Peter Tertzakian: Mr. Darcy’s earth shattering results
– Four Scenarios For The Future Of Energy
– Le pic de pétrole passé depuis 2005 ? Un expert (Jean Laherrère) nous répond
– Flawed views on peak oil rear their ugly heads again
– Ex-Shell CEO Hofmeister takes on Tad Patzek in debate on oil crisis (Feb 14 in Madison)
When the new Italian Prime Minister, Mr. Mario Monti, gave his acceptance speech to the Italian Senate before Christmas, he used the word “growth” 28 times and the word “energy” – well, zero times. Why would this supposed technocrat neglect even to mention the biophysical basis of the world’s economy? Energy, after all, is at the heart of industrial growth society: industrial production, our cities, our transport systems, our buildings and infrastructure, food and water flows, the internet – they all critically depend on oil and gas.
Over the past few years, ever since the financial crisis began to unfold, there’s been sporadic talk in the media and among politicians of the need to reform the credit rating agencies. These agencies are doing a terrible job at forecasting their clients’ futures, and yet their ratings can have catastrophic effects on financial markets and on vast swathes of the world economy. Clearly something needs to change here.
-Jaywalking and the Motor Age
-In China, Cars Lose A Little Luster
-Integration of Bicycling and Walking Facilities into the Infrastructure of Urban Communities [report]
-A Bay Area Experiment in Electric Bike Sharing
The U.S. Justice Department has unveiled a record mortgage settlement with the nation’s five largest banks to resolve claims over faulty foreclosures and mortgage practices that have indebted and displaced homeowners and sunk the nation’s economy. While the deal is being described as a $25 billion settlement, the banks will only have to pay out a total of $5 billion in cash between them. We speak to one of the settlement’s most prominent critics, Yves Smith, a longtime financial analyst who runs the popular finance website, “Naked Capitalism.”
Because childbearing decisions are often built on economic necessities, the less certain you are your children will live to adulthood, the more likely you are to have more of them. A longer term stability depends on keeping child, infant and maternal mortality low, even as we struggle with health care costs and the creation of a lower-energy infrastructure.
On February 6, journalist and activist Chris Hedges wrote a searing article on the Black Bloc. Occupy theorist David Graeber wrote an open letter in reply.
The Black Bloc first appeared in the 80s and has been with demonstrations across the world ever since. The Black Bloc is a tactic, whereby black-clad individuals wearing hoods and masks appear in the midst of a demonstration to trash stores, break windows, etc.
Not involved with Occupy? It’s still important. Occupy is a wild card which could break through the stalemate on energy, climate and politics which bedevils the United States. It could also fizzle out. Or it could take a dark direction, as did some of the radical politics in the 1970s.
– Portland, the US capital of alternative cool
– Are electric or hybrid cars a green marketing myth, or a real solution?
– Is This the Most Beautiful Street in the World?
– Voices from the previews of ‘In Transition 2.0′ (video)
– When the Transition Movement & the Community Rights Movement Start Collaborating, Watch Out!
We are seeing today the first widespread global popular uprising in history that shares a name-tag and an idea: an end to corporate greed, extreme socio-economic inequality and, by deduction, the capitalist system in general. This performance on the world stage is wrestling with notions of publoid space and the challenge of ‘scaling up’.
In this essay I argue that the rapid decline of Greece’s health system –and socioeconomic conditions throughout the nation- is proximately due to a fiscal/economic crisis that political and financial leaders have chosen to address by imposing draconian austerity measures upon most of the Greek people so as to: a.) protect the wealth, status and power of dominant elites, and b.) shield and resuscitate a moribund financial system. The distal cause of the deterioration of Greece’s health system, however, lies in reaching the earth’s physical limits to perpetual economic growth. Therefore, attempting to restart growth –the taken-for-granted panacea- is not working and the case of Greece demonstrates that “austerity” has pernicious costs.
-Air sampling reveals high emissions from gas field [Nature]
-U.S. Shale Gas Exports Face Hurdles, Former Exxon CEO Says
-Poland Hopes Shale Gas Will Free It from Gazprom
-Fracking’s Toll on Pets, Livestock Chills Farmers: Commentary
The first thing you do is show a film. It starts with Power of Community. It starts at the 11th hour at the End of Suburbia. You go against your wishes, lured by a love of documentary, and find yourself talking animatedly amongst strangers about Life at the End of Empire, asking whether you can come to the next core group meeting. In these films there is a moment when you realise that life is not the fairy tale you have been taught to believe. It’s the moment you join Transition.
