Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Around the same year that the American colonies declared their independence, Adam Smith launched one of the most enduring and influential metaphors in all of social thought. That metaphor is the “invisible hand,” the deft limb that is said to convert individual greed or self-interest into public good. During a visit to Edinburgh I made a little pilgrimage to Adam Smith’s grave in the Canongate Kirkyard.
Suppose they held a United Nations conference on sustainability and nobody came?
-On Woody Guthrie’s Centennial, Celebrating the Life, Politics & Music of the “Dust Bowl Troubadour”
-The Breadline
-The Pain in Spain Falls Mainly on the Plain (Folk)
-Chris Hedges and Joe Sacco: drawing America’s invisible poor
Recent evidence shows that a remarkable transformation in African agriculture is underway through a relatively quiet and very Green revolution.
Since 2005, the "total oil supply" for the United States as reported by the Energy Information Administration increased by 2.2 million barrels per day. Of this, 1.3 mb/d, or 60%, has come from natural gas liquids and biofuels, which really shouldn’t be added to conventional crude production for purposes of calculating the available supply. Of the 800,000 b/d increase in actual field production of crude oil, almost all of the gain has come from shale and other tight formations that horizontal fracturing methods have only recently opened up. Here I offer some thoughts on how these new production methods change the overall outlook for U.S. oil production.
One has to go back to the 1930’s to find a time when so much of civilization was in turmoil at once.
James Howard Kunstler describes himself as an “all-purpose writer,” and boy can he write. His latest book “Too Much Magic: Wishful Thinking, Technology, and the Fate of the Nation,” has taken otherwise ‘hard to write clearly about’ subjects such as financial instruments, what’s happening to our environment and shale oil, and made them interesting and useful to the reader, without talking down to, or boring us.
A midweekly roundup of peak oil news, including:
-Developments this week
As the dust settles on Rio+20 what are we to make of it? What key elements of the Sustainable Development debate might have been missing and what signs of hope are there outside the official treaty making world?
It’s not only Sarah Palin who thinks that America is the world’s essential nation because Americans are exceptionally worthy. All too many of us Yanks continue to believe that we’re the smartest, hardest working and most self-reliant people on Earth. And that God or evolution or just history has rewarded us with superpower status and super riches because we deserve it. Well, if you believe any of that, Joel Salatin has come to give you a good spanking.
This week’s (July 9/16) New Yorker has a terrific one-page summary by James Surowiecki of why so many job vacancies are left unfilled “for want of any sufficiently qualified candidates” while so many people (especially young people with university degrees) are unable to find work.
After years of claiming that resources were plentiful and that human ingenuity would find a way to replace those that were becoming exhausted, the capitalist elites have changed their tune. The McKinsey report Resource Revolution, which has already been discussed on this blog, was a clue to the shift in focus away from finance and towards resources, and today’s ReSource conference in Oxford is part of the trend. The rich and powerful are lining up to ensure that they protect the unfair share of the earth’s resources that they enjoy. Now that the finance scam has fallen apart they are adopting more direct strategies.
