Year: 2012

Building resilience in a changing climate

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Building resilience means helping society to work more like an ecosystem—and that has major implications for how we use energy. Ecosystems conserve energy by closing nutrient loops: plants capture and chemically store solar energy, which is then circulated as food throughout the food web. Nothing is wasted. We humans—having developed the ability to draw upon ancient, concentrated, cheap, and abundant (though ultimately finite) fossil fuels—have simultaneously adopted the habit of wasting energy on a colossal scale.

The end of the Industrial Revolution

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What a privilege it is to be alive in these times, in such a significant period in human history. It’s not always easy to see moments of great historical importance when you’re in the middle of them. Sometimes they’re dramatic, like the fall of the Berlin Wall or the landing on the moon. But more often the really big ones appear, from within them, to be unfolding in slow motion. Their actual drama and speed then only becomes clear in hindsight.

That’s how it will be with this. But in the end we’ll look back at this moment and say, yes, that’s when it was clear, that’s when the end game began. The end game of the industrial revolution.

Chile leaves, broccoli stems and pea shoots … expanding what we eat

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Most of us have a powerful sense, instilled culturally, about what we do and don’t consume – and we may not have thought much about it, at least until we encounter another culture’s rather different assumptions.

One of the fascinating projects of cross-cultural exploration is looking in your own yard and garden and finding that there was perfectly edible, often delicious food staring you right in the face, and you never knew it was there. In a situation of shortage, this is a critical difference, but even for the ordinary person who wants to save money, try new tastes and reduce waste, this is good, important stuff.

Climate Change SOS: Soil is the Solution, or the most important environmental story I’ll ever write

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A few months ago I was working on an article about San Francisco’s pioneering efforts to become the world’s first zero-waste city by 2020.

Chronicling this journey toward a current nation-leading 78 percent waste diversion rate, a major focus of the story was on the city’s mandatory composting program that has played a huge role in keeping over a million tons of food scraps, plant trimmings, soiled paper, and other compostable materials from clogging up landfills and releasing methane.

It wasn’t until after the story was published that I was alerted to the most remarkable and possibly game-changing discovery about urban compost: its potential to offset 20 percent and perhaps as much as 40 percent of America’s carbon emissions.

Battery performance deficit disorder

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Batteries fail—as certainly as death and taxes. Rechargeable batteries at least offer the possibility of repeating the cycle, so are in this sense more like recurrent taxes than death. But alas, the story cannot repeat indefinitely… Add to their inevitable demise an overall lackluster performance in battery storage technology, and we have ourselves the makings of a blog post on the failure of batteries to live up to their promises.

The monkeywrench wars

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As the most gizmocentric culture in recorded history, America was probably destined from the start to end up with a military system in which most uniformed personnel operate machinery, and every detail of making war involves a galaxy of high-tech devices. That seems like a huge advantage to most Americans; in practice, it may not be. With the able assistance of Arthur C. Clarke and the Principia Discordia, the Archdruid explains.

Don’t count on revolution in oil supply

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This is a guest post by Sadad al-Huseini, now a petroleum consultant and formerly executive vice president of Saudi Aramco for exploration and production, and is a response to the recent article in PIW (Petroleum Intelligence Weekly) by Leonardo Maugeri on his new study Oil: the Next Revolution, challenging his optimism about future oil supplies.

Pic pétrolier : deux vice-présidents de Total répondent à Oil Man

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English summary: Total has agreed to present on my blog its scenario on world future oil production. No peak oil in sight according to Total, provided the industry puts on stream 45 Mb/d in the next 15 years. How can this tremendous task may be achieved ? Huge uncertainties remain in this unpublished scenario.

La direction du groupe Total a accepté de présenter ici son scénario sur l’avenir du pétrole. Selon elle, aucun déclin des extractions ne s’annonce à l’horizon… à condition de développer d’ici 15 ans l’équivalent de la moitié de la production mondiale actuelle ! Comment réussir pareil tour de force ? De vastes zones d’ombre subsistent dans ce scénario inédit. [excerpt]

An interview with Charles Eisenstein: “Something in your heart knows that this is what life is supposed to be about”

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“I’m not talking about the abolition of money, I’m talking about the transformation of money, so that it takes on the properties of gift. One of those would be that you no longer maintain wealth, status and security by keeping a lot of it, in a gift culture the more you gave the richer you were. The wealthy person was the generous person. Another aspect of it would be to be part of the circle of the gift as in ecology where the waste of any creature is a food for the next.”

The resilience imperative and civil disobedience

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Perhaps we need to follow the leads of McKibben, Jaccard, and Hansen, and go get arrested. Perhaps we need to breathe deeply and act courageously to make hope more concrete and despair less convincing. Perhaps those of us in the 50 to 90-year-old set need to commit to civil disobedience to honor our children, grandchildren and our hopes for their survival. The time has arrived for all of us, but especially the post-war “growth generation” to break out of our too comfortable zones.

Considerations of Chinese demand growth

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There are many parts of the country where these interconnections and improvements to the infrastructure are still going on. As those changes occur, the increasing use of power-driven vehicles continues to rise, and with it the need for increased supply. The risk of exacerbating popular unrest if that change were to stop is just one reason why it is bound to continue, and with it China’s continued need for additional supplies of all forms of fossil fuels.