Peak oil notes – Feb 16
A midweekly roundup of peak oil news, including:
-Developments this week
Tom Whipple
David Graeber: anthropologist, anarchist, financial analyst
After all, no one needs to understand why US firms are shedding jobs, or take a sober look at the current financial regime in the light of the 5,000-year history of debt. Students should just put their heads down and do the sorts of degrees that will give them technical jobs. Pay no attention to The Man behind the curtain!
Economics as a public art
Last week I sat next to a tutor in Political Geography at dinner at an Oxford college. He told me that when his students first come to him, they all believe that human behaviour is simply that of individualistic profit-maximisers. If this is the belief of young geography students, what hope is there that young economists will think otherwise?
‘Breathing new life into the concept of resilience’: the notes from my ‘Four Thought’ talk
I wondered whether in seeing resilience just as something we do in order to be prepared for a crisis, we were missing a trick: that we might instead see it as an opportunity. How might our settlements look if we began to think in terms of resilient food, resilient energy, resilient economies? Might this shift in thinking actually contain the potential for an economic and cultural renaissance for the places we live? It felt to me to be a powerful question.
The EU & Greece: A capitalism that has persuaded the world that capitalism is the world
The behaviour of the EU states towards Greece is inexplicable in the terms in which the EU defines itself. It is, first and foremost, a failure of solidarity.
World energy consumption – beyond 500 exajoules
Today’s post goes into the global consumption of energy and provides a dataset in Excel for researchers on global primary energy consumption from 1830 to 2010. We are now burning 10 times as much energy as a century ago to provide the goods and services we consume. Energy consumption is still increasing rapidly
On the road back to Rio, green direction has been lost
Twenty years ago, an historic environmental summit in Rio de Janeiro produced groundbreaking treaties and high hopes that pressing issues would be addressed. But as organizers prepare for the Rio+20 conference in June, there is little on the agenda to suggest any substantive action will be taken.
Urban agriculture – Feb 15
-Urban Farming Takes Hold in NYC
-The Potential for Urban Agriculture in New York City [report]
-Sydney is buying back the farms at last
-Breaking through the myths: New book seeks to redefine urban farming [interview with authors]
-Urban ag before it was hip
-New urban farming structure breaks ground
Paul Kingsnorth & Friends Discuss “Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist”
Has environmentalism lost its way? What does sustainability really have to do with a healthy planet? During Orion’s latest live web event, Paul Kingsnorth discussed his essay “Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist” in the January/February 2012 issue of the magazine. According to Kingsnorth, environmentalism has effectively died, its original deep connection to nature lost in the language of science and economics. Kingsnorth is joined by authors Lierre Keith and David Abram.
Big government and big corporations befriend the local food movement
The local food movement is one of the great trends to hit the country over the past decade as more people head for farmers markets, join community-supported agriculture groups (CSA) and cooperatives, shop at farm stands and U-picks, sponsor farm-to-school programs and demand local food in their neighborhood grocery stores, school and restaurants. What isn’t widely known is that the federal government, some big corporations and a variety of non-profit and small business organizations are stepping up to encourage the growth and viability of a local food system in order to give people of all income levels access to local food that is healthier, safer and fresher.
Bye, Bye Capitalism (review of Fleeing Vesuvius, Part 1)
By definition capitalism depends on capital accumulation, the production of an economic surplus that can be reinvested in new capital (property and machines) to expand production even further. In the beginning of Fleeing Vesuvius, the authors demonstrate how producing this surplus was only possible because of the vast amount of cheap (practically free) work performed by fossil fuel energy. Obviously there were rich people (landowners and merchants) prior to industrialization. However there weren’t any capitalists – production was far too limited to accumulate capital.
Fossil fuels: I’m not dead yet
Having looked at the major alternatives to fossil fuel energy production (summarized here), we come away with the general sentiment that the easy days of cheap energy are not evidently carried forward into a future without fossil fuels. That’s right, fossil fuels will be dead and gone. Is it time to pile them on the cart to be hauled away?
