Peak Moment 222: Applying a peak oil filter to financial choices
“If peak oil occurs, it will dominate most everything else that we do, because energy drives everything.”
Year: 2012
Crippling Intellects
People can be individually smart and collectively dumb. Or some may argue that people can be individually dumb yet collectively smart. When it comes to plotting a future path, I think we often get the worst of both worlds. In this post, I’ll look at the role that mental horsepower plays in our societal narratives, for better or for worse. We’ll explore two aspects to the problem: people who are so smart that they have dumb ideas; and smart people who are held captive by the manufactured “dumb” of society.
Mr Moyse and the Green Tomatoes
When I joined Transition the following year, I began to write again, after many years silence, and one of the very first stories I wrote was about the little roadside stall I found with neat bunches of leeks for sale and the man who grew them in his wedge-shaped garden.
Occupy Sandy, from relief to resistance
Two weeks ago I was in my hometown of Hoboken, New Jersey, wading waist deep in a murky combination of floodwater, oil and sewage. More than a week later, after finally getting unstuck from New Jersey (even the deepest Jersey pride has its limits…), I found myself in a van full of Occupy Sandy activists delivering hot meals to housing-project high rises in Coney Island during a Nor’easter.
John Michael Greer: If the Four Horsemen arrive, offer beer
The two narratives that I watch constantly going back and forth, I think of them as "Tweedle-dee and Tweedle-doom" of our vision of the future. It’s either the narrative of progress or the narrative of apocalypse; one or the other.
World Energy Outlook 2012 – NYT article focusing on the USA
Today the IEA’s World Energy Outlook for 2012 was released. I will comment on the report when I have had an opportunity to read it. At the moment numerous newspaper articles have misunderstood the contents of WEO2012.
Cities–too big to fail?
This post is a follow-up to last week’s post about our dialogue about big cities and descent.
The sufficiency economy: envisioning a prosperous way down
If a society does not have some vision of where it wants to be or what it wants to become, it cannot know whether it is heading in the right direction – it cannot even know whether it is lost. This is the confused position of consumer capitalism today, which has a fetish for economic growth but no answer to the question of what that growth is supposed to be for.
What is holistic livestock management?
Holistic management seeks to restore grassland ecosystems by using livestock as a proxy for the wild herds of grazing ruminants that the prairies and savannas of the world co-evolved with and depend on.
IEA – World Energy Outlook 2012 – Nov 12
•World Energy Outlook 2012 Executive Summary •U.S. Oil Output to Overtake Saudi Arabia’s by 2020 •IEA calls for focus on energy efficiency •IEA cuts global forecast for growth in nuclear capacity
Forest livelihoods
Today we see the woods as somewhere we go to walk the dog, where we have picnics and cycle rides. They have mostly become places of leisure where we take the kids to teach them about nature, gather some conkers and acorns and let them run wild for an hour or so.
Our dependence on oil puts a glass ceiling on economic recovery
The era of cheap oil is rapidly coming to an end, ushering in ‘economic peak oil’ – the point at which the cost of incremental supply exceeds the price economies can pay without significantly disrupting economic activity at a given point in time.
