Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
How many times a day do we say or think "I’m comfortable with this" or "I’m not comfortable with that"? How often is it a way to avoid looking at what’s going on and our part in it, as much as a valid expression of something really being not quite right?
A recent spate of official reports from energy agencies are predicting a rosy future of economic growth underpinned by cheap oil abundance. However, as Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed shows, scientific evidence largely ignored by mainstream media confirms that while we have enough oil and gas to burn our way to climate catastrophe, the age of cheap oil abundance is a myth.
Welcome to the last ODAC Newsletter, the final news roundup from the Oil Depletion Analysis Centre…2012 saw US oil production grow to its highest level in 15 years, largely because of surging tight oil production by fracking, and many pundits such as Ed Morse of Citi are claiming “peak oil is dead”. So has ODAC been worrying its silly little head entirely unnecessarily for the last five years, and could all our energy troubles soon be over? We continue to think not…
WUD Society and Politics Committee, and Madison Peak Oil Group host energy/finance expert Nate Hagens for a presentation that weaves together economics, anthropology, psychology, finance, trade, energy and human behavior into a coherent story about our human social system.
These days, people are maxed out on every level trying to get through life as everything gets more tedious, expensive, and uncertain. The onslaught of “glittering generalities” and opinionated political rhetoric coming from popular media and paid advertising on “both” sides is enough to make many shut off and tune out – their philosophical bandwidth running at full capacity until it is choked off entirely.
2012: is it really the end of the world? Are the tectonic plates going to tilt, like in the movie, and dump us off? Will the earth crack open and the seas split? Unlikely. You can breathe a qualified sigh of relief. Mayan shamans and scholars tell us that the close of this great cycle of the Mayan calendar is not the cue for apocalypse but rather a new beginning, another turn of the wheel.
Transition groups aim ultimately to catalyse the localisation of their local economy. They strive to move from running small community projects to thinking and acting much bigger. New skills and ways of thinking will lead Transition initiatives to become social enterprises, such as becoming developers, banks, energy companies and so on.
Today is the last day on Earth, according to some New Age interpretation of the Mayan calendar. This belief has caused endless suffering and useless expensive purchases by people trying to “beat the clock” and find somewhere safe to spend their last few hours. Cheap places have suddenly become outrageously expensive, because someone said “Hang out there!” during your final hours. However, saying “Goodbye to Tomorrow” has a long history that goes beyond this moment in time. Humans are famous for planning the end of not only their own anticipated deaths, but because that is just too commonplace, they have to anticipate the death of everyone and everything around them…So for those who believe that Today is the last day on Earth I say: ”So long, it’s been good to know you.” For the rest of us, let’s continue to work for change, with the utmost of care, and always anticipate that Tomorrow MIGHT come.
Abstract: The political-economic limits to system innovation are explored through the Polanyian concepts of disembedding and the ‘double movement’. The Keynesian Welfare State is examined as the final outcome of a much broader ‘counter movement for societal protection.’ In place of reciprocity and autarchy, the Keynesian social compact involved the establishment of new, top-down circuits of redistribution, designed to facilitate continuing processes of capitalist modernization. Where social innovation is directed at the broad dynamics of marketization and the commodification of goods and services, this growth imperative continues to present an insuperable obstacle to system-level change. But as ecological capital at the level of the biosphere becomes a critical focus for a new protective ‘counter-movement’ and ‘degrowth’ becomes the de facto context for social innovation, systemic transformation becomes more thinkable. Hodgson’s ‘evotopia’ is recommended as a heuristic for a provisional, experimental and incremental exploration of the ‘adjacent possible.’
It was the best of times; it was the worst of times for the American public over the past month, as it was treated to two high-profile, but deeply conflicting, economic forecasts.
•Peak farmland" is here, crop area to diminish: study
•A Grocery Store For The People Planned For West Oakland Food Desert
•Blackpool to give free breakfasts to all primary school pupils
•How the Food Movement Is Gaining Strength
Introducing my post-electric washing machine, which I call the Deindustrial 2020. It’s of the future, not the past – although it does look rather like the old-style, Medieval 1450. It was made for only $2.
