Year: 2012

Let us be Human: Christianity for a collapsing culture

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I’ve written the sort of book that someone conversant with Peak Oil etc. could give to a friend who is a committed Christian, and explains, not just the basic problems but *why* Christians should be concerned about it, how the real problems arose, and what in Christian terms should now be done.

It isn’t about addressing Peak Oil etc directly (e.g. prepare to use less fuel, advice about growing your own vegetables etc), it’s more about generating the required virtues that will enable those steps to then be taken.

Economist calls gateway pipeline an inflationary ‘threat’

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In a detailed analysis submitted to the National Energy Board, Robyn Allan, the former president and CEO of the Insurance Corporation of British Columbia, concludes that “Northern Gateway is neither needed nor is in the public interest.” Moreover the project, if built, would raise the price of every oil barrel by $2 to $3 dollars in Canada over the next 30 years, and thereby create an inflationary price shock that would have “a negative and prolonged impact… by reducing output, employment, labour income and government revenues.”

Stop digging

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We can be cynical about the profit motives of the industrialists, but there was a genuine desire to avoid unemployment and the suffering it caused, and to stimulate demand by any means to make sure there were enough jobs to go around. The strategy worked within its own terms, but it has left us in the disastrous position where efficiency in terms of energy and resources has no place in the modern economy. Now that we recognise the limits to growth we need to unpick this Keynsian solution and rethink the role of aggregate demand as the solution to our economic woes.

The great carbon bubble: Why the fossil fuel industry fights so hard

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If we could see the world with a particularly illuminating set of spectacles, one of its most prominent features at the moment would be a giant carbon bubble, whose bursting someday will make the housing bubble of 2007 look like a lark. As yet — as we shall see — it’s unfortunately largely invisible to us.

What is energy for?

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So familiar has the social economy of energy become in modern societies, so routine its extraordinardinary wastefulness, so toxic its effects, that the capacity for a better way can be missed. By questioning the how, why and what of energy use, new possibilities – of living, travelling, eating, working and buying – can open.

Farmers Go Wild

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Practitioners of wild farming, also called conservation-based agriculture, seek to reverse industrial agriculture’s devastating effects on wildlife by adopting farming methods that support nature. They envision a landscape where farms meld into the environment and mimic the natural processes that surround them. If wild farming sounds like organic farming, that’s because both are based on a similar vision: that farms should be managed as natural systems. Most wild farmers employ organic practices, like nontoxic pest management, composting, and crop rotation, all of which encourage biodiversity.

Methane hydrates: the next communication bomb in the climate change debate

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Methane hydrates are a true climate bomb that could go off by itself as the result of a relatively small trigger in the form of a global warming. Sufficient warming would cause the decomposition of some hydrates to release methane to the atmosphere. This methane would create more warming and that would generate more decomposition of the hydrates.

The effects of the rapid release of so much methane would be devastating: an abrupt climate change that could bring a true planetary catastrophe.

Energy and presidential politics

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Va. Governor Bob. McDonnell is on a GOP VP short list and recently threw his endorsement to candidate Mitt “corporations are people, my friend” Romney. But in an era of energy decline it’s worth learning how heavily Big Coal funds McDonnell, who calls himself a “friend of coal,” and how uncommitted he is to clean energy.

Will peak oil spell the end of capitalism? (review of Fleeing Vesuvius)

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The basic theme of Fleeing Vesuvius, which is aimed at the growing sustainability movement, is TEOTWAWI (The End of the World as We Know It). The title refers to the volcano that destroyed Pompeii in 79 AD, specifically the large number of residents who failed to save themselves, despite weeks of earthquakes, gaseous clouds and other obvious signs that an eruption was imminent. For more than a decade, a growing body of evidence suggests that the planet is on the verge of economic and ecological collapse. Yet the vast majority of us do absolutely nothing to prepare for the stark conditions ahead.

Ending “Farmer’s Wife” Syndrome

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We have used language to write women out of agriculture – out of its history, out of its present, engaging in the “housewifization” of real agricultural work. The implication that the farmer’s wife is not a farmer, and is thus knowledgeable about only kitchens and babies (as important as those things are) is a diminuation, an act of linguistic violence that erases the multiple competences of farm women, partnered or not.