Year: 2012

Treehugger, Monbiot and Is Peak Oil Over?

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I can’t really blame George Monbiot or anyone else for buying the narrative hype. Right now the overwhelming narrative is that we have no energy constraints at all. Folks wonder aloud whether the US should join OPEC. Increasingly ridiculous projections are made about the potential of shale oil and new drilling techniques. Slight upticks are assumed to be headed to their logical extremes, and Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government issues a report saying we’ve got all the oil we could ever want. So is it really surprising that Monbiot, who has been focused on climate change, not peak oil, is buying the story, asks Treehugger?

Crafting Resilient Health Systems: An Introduction

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During the 20th century an indispensible yet unrecognized factor allowed the health sciences to attain dizzying levels of organizational complexity and achieve countless life saving and prolonging breakthroughs. The health professions drew upon ever-increasing amounts of human and natural resources, particularly energy…Therefore, the complexity of modern health systems and their accomplishments are an epiphenomenon of economic expansion made possible first and foremost by natural resources; only secondarily are they reflections of capital and labor expressed through human intelligence, drive and ingenuity. The era of cheap and plentiful energy is over and this has profound implications for the health sciences and modern world.

Growing beyond growth for true democracy

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“Growth” is, once again, the buzzword of the moment among Europe’s politicians, thanks to Francoise Hollande, the milquetoast Socialist recently elected to succeed Nicolas Sarkozy as President of France. “My mission now,” Hollande told supporters on the night of his electoral victory, “is to give European construction a growth dimension.” President Obama praised Holland at Camp David, telling reporters he would urge “other G8 leaders” to adopt a “strong growth agenda.” The previous buzzword, “austerity,” is meanwhile in decline.

The wrong kind of magic

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Carl Jung and his physicist friend Wolfgang Pauli suggested in a too rarely read 1952 book that synchronicity—an “acausal connecting principle,” to use Jung’s carefully phrased description—brought events that occur at the same time into a relationship of unexpected meaning. Whether or not they were right in general, there are times when synchronicities arrive with all the subtlety of a cold wet mackerel across the face, and last Friday was one of those.

Some Transition reflections on George Monbiot’s announcement that “we were wrong on peak oil”

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George Monbiot announced in the Guardian on Monday “We were wrong on peak oil. There’s enough to fry us all”, an article which concluded “peak oil hasn’t happened, and it’s unlikely to happen for a very long time”. Several people have written, and even stopped me while I’ve been out shopping, to ask for my take on his piece, so here it is. It has been a tricky thing to write, as in the time it took me to compose it, so many other interesting analyses of it have been posted, many of which I have tried to reference here…What he does prompt is a rethink in terms of how we present peak oil.

Peak oil – July 3

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– Monbiot: We were wrong on peak oil. There’s enough to fry us all
– David Strahan on Peakonomics: why the oil price slide is temporary
– Peak Plastic: One Generation’s Trash Is Another Generation’s Treasure
– Peak Blame (interview with Mark Robinowitz of OilEmpire.us)
– Der Energieforscher Ferdi Schüth über die Energiewende und die Zeit danach (interview)
– Peak oil and the lost message of the carbon tax in Australia

Food & agriculture – July 3

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– NYT: Small Farmers Creating a New Business Model as Agriculture Goes Local
– The Conversation: David Holmgren, co-founder of permaculture movement
– Factory-Fed Fish: Monsanto and Cargill’s Plan for the Ocean
– Mainstream India television show: Toxic Food – Poison On Our Plate?
– The Global Diabetes Epidemic, Brought to You by Global Development (new)