Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Staff -Air sampling reveals high emissions from gas field [Nature]
-U.S. Shale Gas Exports Face Hurdles, Former Exxon CEO Says
-Poland Hopes Shale Gas Will Free It from Gazprom
-Fracking’s Toll on Pets, Livestock Chills Farmers: Commentary
-Jaywalking and the Motor Age
-In China, Cars Lose A Little Luster
-Integration of Bicycling and Walking Facilities into the Infrastructure of Urban Communities [report]
-A Bay Area Experiment in Electric Bike Sharing
On February 6, journalist and activist Chris Hedges wrote a searing article on the Black Bloc. Occupy theorist David Graeber wrote an open letter in reply.
The Black Bloc first appeared in the 80s and has been with demonstrations across the world ever since. The Black Bloc is a tactic, whereby black-clad individuals wearing hoods and masks appear in the midst of a demonstration to trash stores, break windows, etc.
Not involved with Occupy? It’s still important. Occupy is a wild card which could break through the stalemate on energy, climate and politics which bedevils the United States. It could also fizzle out. Or it could take a dark direction, as did some of the radical politics in the 1970s.
Over the past few years, ever since the financial crisis began to unfold, there’s been sporadic talk in the media and among politicians of the need to reform the credit rating agencies. These agencies are doing a terrible job at forecasting their clients’ futures, and yet their ratings can have catastrophic effects on financial markets and on vast swathes of the world economy. Clearly something needs to change here.
The first thing you do is show a film. It starts with Power of Community. It starts at the 11th hour at the End of Suburbia. You go against your wishes, lured by a love of documentary, and find yourself talking animatedly amongst strangers about Life at the End of Empire, asking whether you can come to the next core group meeting. In these films there is a moment when you realise that life is not the fairy tale you have been taught to believe. It’s the moment you join Transition.
The propaganda technique of the repeated lie has been applied obsessively, against the “hockey stick,” the reconstruction of past temperatures on which Michael Mann and coworkers had been working from the 1990s.
It is rare in the history of science that a single piece of experimental evidence has been the object of so many attempts of demolition. Yet, all the serious reviews of the original data have basically confirmed the initial results. Being unsuccessful in demolishing the science, the attacks have moved against the scientist, Michael Mann himself, who has been subjected to an unbelievable denigration campaign, defamed, insulted, and even physically threatened.
We’d like Obama to come clean and tell it like it is: There is a fundamental trade-off between economic growth and environmental protection.
Maybe the truth about economic growth and environmental protection doesn’t make for an easier choice between the two, but what kind of a choice can be borne of a lie?
Outrageous, snarky, “madly engaging,” bileful—these are a few of the terms that have been used to describe author and social critic James Howard Kunstler. But he’s actually a great deal more than these things, as anyone who’s really come to know him, even if only through his books and Internet postings, can tell you. His most personal writings reveal a human, vulnerable, wonderfully versatile, cheerful side that few people know exists.
When I first saw the film “Three Kings” years ago, it occurred to me that it was one of the clearest explanations of American foreign policy I had ever seen. I am certain, however, that this was not the intention of the filmmaker. But let’s see how the story illuminates our foreign policy.
We hold these truths to be self-evident:
That the real, physical world is the source of our own lives, and the lives of others. A weakened planet is less capable of supporting life, human or otherwise.
Thus the health of the real world is primary, more important than any social or economic system, because all social or economic systems are dependent upon a living planet.
– My Decade of Being “Peak Oil Aware”
– Peak oil educator Richard Heinberg challenges “binary thinking”
– U.S. Oil Fields Stage “Great Revival,” But No Easing Gas Prices
– Robert Rapier: Peak Oil & Carbon Emissions (video)
Connecting food to the local economy can provide more people with greater access to local foods.
Making it happen is another story since the necessary infrastructure was gradually dismantled over the past 70 years in favor of a national/global food system that promises low prices, year-round accessibility of products and convenience.
