Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Molly Scott Cato Greens are portrayed in the media as profits of doom, as though a fascination with the negative impacts of our lifestyle might be some sort of psychological flaw. My own view is that we are closer to reality than the vast majority of the population, who are trapped in denial about the ecological crisis, but none the less I think it is worth re-evaluating the extraordinary achivements of the 200-year oil bloom.
We must not work or think on a heroic scale. In our age of global industrialism, heroes too likely risk the lives of places and things they do not see. We must work on a scale proper to our limited abilities. We must not break things we cannot fix. There is no justification ever for permanent ecological damage. If this imposes the verdict of guilt upon us all, so be it.
-The Lost World
-Peak Psychotherapy, Abundant Human Connection
-Delivering Educational Products: The Job Formerly Known as Teaching
-A National Security Strategy That Doesn’t Focus on Threats
Can the president who killed Osama bin Laden now stand up to Big Oil? Encouraged by comments made by House Speaker John Boehner that subsidies for oil and gas companies should be on the table, Democrats have revived their stalled effort to cut billions per year in taxpayer handouts to the largest oil and gas companies. But the oil lobby is not going gently into that good night.
I read yesterday that “a Sri Lankan scientist is calling for the drafting of “Millennium Consumption Goals” to [help] rich countries to curb their climate-damaging consumption habits, in the same way the poor have Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) to get them out of poverty.” A fantastic idea—but what would these MCGs include?
I believe the very simplistic view is that by going after the oil companies, they are going to relent and lower gas prices. Thus, their profits will return to “normal” levels along with our gas prices. We want a return to the good old days of sub-$2/gallon gasoline. But most of the proposals that are being floated won’t do anything to relieve high gas prices, although they may have an impact on oil company profits. If that’s the case, then what is the point? I would say that it is simply feeling like justice was served. We want to get even with Big Oil.
Last week’s post suggested that any serious response to the predicament of industrial society has to start with using a good deal less energy and resources. The conventional wisdom in response to that suggestion is to insist that if person A doesn’t use a given resource, person B will, so person A might as well get his snout in the trough with everyone else. Plausible though this sounds, it misses one of the core issues at stake: what happens to those who are dependent on the trough when the trough runs dry?
Blue Hill became the third town in Maine to adopt the Local Food and Self-Governance Ordinance. The Ordinance asserts that towns can determine their own food and farming policies locally, and exempts direct food sales from state and federal license and inspection requirements.
Most of us can recall from Economics 101 the concept of elasticity of price demand which says that in most cases as the price of something goes up, the demand for the product or service goes down. Studying the elasticity of gasoline prices has been very popular recently and that in the last 20 years there have been well over 100 papers written on the elasticity of gasoline prices.
The general conclusion of these efforts is that gasoline demand in motorized societies such as the U.S. falls slowly. In the very short run, motorists have no choice but to spend whatever it costs to keep their automobiles and trucks running for their livelihoods depend on it.
For all the recessions from 1973 on, energy prices were rising either before or immediately at the onset of the recession, and in every case they “broke” in some sense before the recession was over – either declining, or at least sharply slowing in growth. The paradigm case is 1973 where energy prices were rising steadily and then a huge oil shock coincides with the start of the recession, which only ends after prices have stabilized.
The OFS would require that 50 percent of new automobiles in 2014, 80 percent in 2016, and 95 percent in 2017, would be warranted to operate on non-petroleum fuels in addition to or instead of petroleum based fuels. Compliance possibilities include the full array of existing technologies – including flex fuel, natural gas, hydrogen, biodiesel, plug-in electric drive, and fuel cell – and a catch-all for new technologies. This requirement will then provide certainty to investors to produce alternative fuels and fueling stations to have a variety of pumps supplying those alternative fuels.
For some reason, no doubt because I am a child of the money economy, my biggest distress was over my billfold. It was covered in yellow slime. I hurried over to the machine shed where I knew some rags were hanging, and commenced to clean up my proud symbol of capitalism. Then I tried to wipe the yokes and white stuff out of the pocket although by now much of it was all sliding lasciviously down my leg.
