Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
David Stern Does energy availability and quality drive economic growth? Or is energy use merely a side effect of growth? Has the relationship between energy and growth changed over time? And what factors have reduced the energy needed to produce a dollar of GDP?
In the absence of any info to the contrary so far, I am going to draw myself up in grandiose hauteur and declare that I grew the longest ear of dent corn in the world this year. It is Reid’s Yellow Dent open-pollinated corn and if it is not the longest ear, I bet it is the biggest. Other years, I have grown ears nearly as long as this 15 incher, but this is the first time there were 20 rows of kernels on such ears instead of 16 or 18 rows.
What if a variety of dent corn could be developed that consistently produced very large ears on every stalk? My biggest ears easily contain a pound of kernels each. Even at a plant population of 25,000, lower than commercial plant populations used today, that would mean a record-breaking yield of over 400 bushels per acre. Because it is open-pollinated corn, the farmer could save his own seed, thereby saving a bunch more money. Think of the conniption fits commercial seed corn growers would throw, if farmers started planting with their own seed.
A midweekly roundup of peak oil news, including:
-Developments this week
-Futures
I read so many books about peak oil, the state of the world, and environmental degradation that I often glaze over. This one is different. It has authority born from practical experience, a musculature that is immediately engaging, even reassuring. It feels mature. The book is not afraid to catalogue the limitations and failures, even celebrate them, as well as the successes. I like the way the book was crowd sourced. Rob blogged on each Transition Tool and invited feedback and ideas. The participatory aspect brings it alive: here is more than one visionary man’s voice but a whole chorus of voices.
It has been clear for several years that the money created during the banking boom was produced from thin air and could never be repaid, yet those amongst the elite who nominally hold this value are refusing to relinquish it now that their bubble has burst.
Many Do the Math posts have touched on the inevitable cessation of growth and on the challenge we will face in developing a replacement energy infrastructure once our fossil fuel inheritance is spent. The focus has been on long-term physical constraints, and not on the messy details of our response in the short-term. But our reaction to a diminishing flow of fossil fuel energy in the short-term will determine whether we transition to a sustainable but technological existence or allow ourselves to collapse. One stumbling block in particular has me worried. I call it The Energy Trap.
A new report from Greenpeace calls for the complete closure of all Japanese nuclear power plants by 2012. The report was released at the same time as the new Prime Minister, Yoshihiko Noda, was making his first policy speech to parliament calling for the restart of all reactors that are currently offline due to routine safety checks and maintenance.
– Q&A with Post-Carbon Institute’s Richard Heinberg
– Europeans fear climate change more than financial turmoil, poll shows
– Deep in the heart of Texas, the scientific consensus is alive and kicking — no matter what the local politicians say
– Business Week: Marx is relevant again
It seems remarkably hard for people nowadays to remember that ours is hardly the first society to find itself teetering on the edge of catastrophic change. In this next installment of The Archdruid Report‘s discussion of the interface between peak oil and magic–that is, the art and science of causing change in consciousness in accordance with will–another society in much the same situation provides the stage, and one of the most improbable figures in 19th century history is the main character. His insights have an uncanny relevance to some elements of the crisis of our own time.
Dear young man who died on the fourth day of this turbulent 2011, dear Mohammed Bouazizi, I want to write you about an astonishing year — with three months yet to run. I want to tell you about the power of despair and the margins of hope and the bonds of civil society. I wish you could see the way that your small life and large death became a catalyst for the fall of so many dictators in what is known as the Arab Spring. We are now in some sort of an American Fall. Civil society here has suddenly hit the ground running, and we are all headed toward a future no one imagined when you, a young Tunisian vegetable seller capable of giving so much, who instead had so much taken from you, burned yourself to death to protest your impoverished and humiliated state.
The Occupy Wall Street movement – for now it is a movement – is the most important political happening in the United States since the uprisings in 1968, whose direct descendant or continuation it is.
Occupy Wall Street gatherings on Oct. 15 at around 1500 sites in some 80 countries revealed a global uprising for building democratic learning and action communities. People were joyous to be together in streets and parks, on church steps, outside banks, and elsewhere—playing music, chanting, and exercising their freedoms. They sat in circles, paraded around with bands, and fed each other in dramatic outpourings of anger, aspiration, feelings, energy, humor, yearning, and wisdom.
