Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
– Boston Globe on McKibben: The man who crushed the Keystone XL pipeline
– David Suzuki: What’s So Radical About Caring for the Earth and Opposing Enbridge’s Northern Gateway Pipeline?
– After Keystone XL Decision, Don’t Believe GOP Hype on Energy
– Fossil fuel subsidies: a tour of the data
– Natural gas galore?
– US Thirst for Fossil Fuels is Decimating Nature’s Wildlife: Report
– Fracking the World: Energy Companies Set Their Sights Globally
– EU prepares unprecedented attack on Iranian economy
– Barrelling towards fuel shortages
– An Iran war is brewing from mutual ignorance and chronic miscalculation
Today’s industrial societies preen themselves on their openness to change and the vast number of choices they provide to their inmates — er, citizens. Why is it, then, that all those changes and choices inevitably amount to more of what we’ve already got — which is not exactly working well any more? The Archdruid considers the options, and offers an unwelcome but necessary suggestion.
There have been enough developments in the cold fusion story during the last two weeks to warrant revisiting the subject. … while it seems likely that LENR reactions are a real phenomenon, it has yet to be proven that commercial products which can start replacing fossil fuels are only months away. We should have some answers to this question – one way or another — before the year is out.
A midweekly roundup of peak oil news, including:
-Developments this week
We know an evolution is needed. We know that evolution is being birthed within the crumbling of the old ways of being and doing that for so long have not served us or our earth. We see shapes of what is rising, the many new ways of thinking, feeling, being and doing now being created and embraced by increasing numbers of people. Yet much of what will evolve is still blocked from our view. It is a time of complexities, challenges and deep hope.
The fact is everything we do is shaped by energy – by electricity, by oil, by gas- and there is not one of these sources of power that doesn’t somehow leave blood on our hands and present some kind of dilemma.
If only the rest of the world could emulate the Government of Rajasthan in India in adopting public policies to promote the commons! As the Times of India reports “Rajasthan has become the first state in the country to have drafted a policy underlining the importance and the need to preserve and secure common land (commons) in rural areas.” There may be other such government policies around the world, but they are few and far between. The Rajasthan policies are a real breakthrough.
With increasing geopolitical instability in oil producing states and the barriers that stand in the way of reaching a multilateral policy, the threat of sanctions in Iran only serves to intensify uncertainty surrounding oil price forecasts for 2012.
There was some good news on the local food security front this fall. One recent critical success was the election of antifracking candidates in several Tompkins County towns, which for the moment at least has challenged the claimed right of area landowners to extract short-term profits at the expense of the long-term health and agricultural productivity of local farmland. The other development was the November 2011 approval of the Town of Ithaca Agricultural and Farmland Protection Plan (AFPP) by the Ithaca Town Board and the preparation of similar plans for the Towns of Lansing and Ulysses.
We provide new statistical evidence to show that energy efficiency policies and programs can reliably cut energy use—a finding that is consistent with the policy stance of leading experts and organizations like the US Energy Information Agency (EIA) and the World Bank. Additionally, we take our policy message one step further—by using new insights from the emerging multi-disciplinary literature on “energy efficiency gap,” we recommend that the world needs more energy efficiency policies and programs to cut greenhouse gases—not less as implied by the BTI and its cohorts in the media.
