Harro Matt

Knowledge, technology, and the politics of rice

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The dominant focus on advanced technologies and higher-level politics, I argue here, has limited value for understanding crucial elements in processes of technological change that take place in society, therewith touching upon key democratic values. This is illustrated with introduced changes to rice cultivation. Technological change is often associated with innovation.

China Coal Update

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World coal production and consumption data for 2011 are not yet compiled and published, but one key number is in. China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology reports that the country’s coal output rose 8.7 percent from 2010 to reach 3.88 billion short tons last year. For comparison, US consumption in 2010 was just over 1 billion tons—and holding steady (mostly due to cheap natural gas prices). If the current trend continues, China will burn well over 4 billion tons of coal in 2012, four times as much as the US.

Review: Petroplague by Amy Rogers

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We have a brand-new entrant to the oil-eating-bug-runs-amok tradition: the self-published novel Petroplague. It’s a Crichton-esque thriller written by microbiology professor-turned author Amy Rogers, who says she aims to “blur the line between fact and fiction so well that you need a Ph.D. to figure out where one ends and the other begins.” The plot involves a batch of experimental, oil-hungry bacteria inadvertently loosed upon Los Angeles, which proceed to wreak a near biblical swath of destruction. Part ecology lesson and part cautionary tale, Petroplague is an entertaining entrée into the subject of oil depletion and its implications for society, human health and the environment.

Oil, Iran and the peak – March 8

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– Stop blaming oil speculators and start listening to them: A war with Iran would devastate the economy
– We Can Live with a Nuclear Iran
– Oil creeps toward top of Asia’s economic worry list
– 10th ASPO-International Conference in Vienna May 30 – June 1
– Ölreserven: Der “Doomsday” war gestern

Goodby Supermarkets!

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Today, in Lewes, we spend about fifty million pounds a year on food and drink and most of that – at least forty million – is spent in our three supermarkets: Tesco, Waitrose and Aldi. In those hundred years – and especially the last fifty years since I was born – we’ve managed to let all this natural capital be diverted into the hands of a few multinational corporations. Our local food economies have dried up; local money no longer circulates around and about the town, building wealth and relationships as it goes. A tenner spent locally multiplies many times over as it circulates. Spent in a supermarket, that tenner goes straight out of town and into the hands of Tesco and co, and its shareholders.

This hugely hopeful moment

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Even though there is huge fear, dislocation, unemployment and suffering powering through Europe and America just as it has been powering through so many other parts of the world for so long. Even when it becomes absolutely clear that in the current system, in order to keep those at the top ‘safe’’, everyone else is being pulverised as the financiers and their professional and political accomplices are rescued with the money of the rest of us. Even though that financial crisis is fast becoming a sovereign debt crisis and the free market’s gun is being held to country after country’s heads in Europe just as the IMF has done for decades elsewhere. Even though the oil tanker of economic growth is fast developing huge holes that no billions of dollars can plug. Even though, or should we say, because of this: we are living in a hugely hopeful moment.