Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Our initial proposal was called the Stanford Re-Use Campaign, but, in hindsight, a more accurate title would have been Baiting People with Free Stuff to Change Their Consumer Behavior.
-What would British roadsl look like if we treated them the same way we do our cycle lanes?
-Check Out This Great Bike-Sharing ‘How To’ Guide for U.S. Cities!
-Building walkable cities cuts emissions more than fuel taxes, study says
-World’s Coolest Bus Commercial
The last month has seen exciting U.S. sail-transport developments. Three encouraging events indicate that the nation may no longer be falling behind Europe in nurturing a critical form of renewable energy. In northern Europe at least four well-established players are operating on a significant scale, and preparing to build more ships…Due in part to the constant promotion of sail power by the Sail Transport Network and participating sailors since 1999, the U.S. is finally rising to the occasion. The occasion is none other than the recent historic global peaking of easy-to-extract-and-refine conventional crude oil, and the accelerating destabilization of the Earth’s benign climate.
Historians like to say that we can’t “go back” to the past and that certainly is true in a general sort of way. But as a matter of fact, in farming circles, we are always “going back” one way or another. In every generation there are people who decide that “going back” is a way to escape what they dislike in the present and there are a whole lot of people, now and historically, who dislike what is going on in agriculture.
Today’s launch of the Bristol Pound (£B) represents a step change for the UK local currency movement, one which nef is very proud to have supported as part of our Community Currency 2.0 project.
It has now been more than 33 years since Jimmy Carter’s famous “malaise’ speech given in July 1979. As this speech is often cited as the beginning of the end for the Carter Presidency, no politician in the intervening years has seen fit to offer anything but an optimistic, upbeat outlook on the course of the nation and its economy.
It’s fifteen years after the Great Blackout. The United States, at the very least, is entirely free of electricity for reasons as yet unknown (but it sure smells like, get this, a conspiracy!) Humans have left the cities for the countryside to live in communal villages or prey on one another. The good guys sport henleys and hoes. The bad ones also wear henleys, but they ride horses and carry swords…
“There have been few more passionate debates in resource economics than around peak oil, whether it has or hasn’t happened and indeed whether peak oil is about resources left or production levels.”
-Has vehicle efficiency really curbed U.S. oil demand?
-Thresholds in the economic effects of oil prices
-Fuel use in new cars could halve by 2030: IEA
A mid-week round-up of peak oil news.
40% of all food produced worldwide, and nearly half of all food produced in the US goes to waste. When you break down the realities of food waste, you see that in the developing world, much of the waste is due to lack of ability to preserve food — no refrigeration means that sheep you slaughtered is waste if all of it isn’t eaten or dried or otherwise preserved immediately.
In the Global North, however, the vast majority of food is wasted not in the field, but in the process of getting to our homes.
We’ve known for a long time about basic polar amplification. Warming melts highly reflective white ice and snow, which is replaced by the dark blue sea or dark land, both of which absorb far more sunlight and hence far more solar energy. More recently another insidious feedback has become obvious — as the Arctic ice retreats, big oil companies can drill for more fossil fuels whose combustion will accelerate warming and ice retreat…Local pollution in the Arctic from shipping and oil and gas industries, which have expanded in the region due to a thawing of sea ice caused by global warming, could further accelerate that thaw, experts say.
