United States – April 22
– NYT: Nation’s Mood at Lowest Level in Two Years, Poll Shows
– Economists and the ‘Inside Job’ Effect
– American Exceptionalism – it takes money to project power around the world
Staff
Peak oil notes – April 21
A midweekly roundup of peak oil news, including:
-Developments this week
-Saudi oil production
Wisdom from clear thinkers on the way ahead
Considered out of touch just a few years ago, these two clear thinkers’ predictions have proven to be on the money. They offer an astute picture of the near future and practical advice on landing on our feet.
Is the world too big to fail?
Support for democracy is the province of ideologists and propagandists. In the real world, elite dislike of democracy is the norm. The evidence is overwhelming that democracy is supported insofar as it contributes to social and economic objectives, a conclusion reluctantly conceded by the more serious scholarship.
Energy dysfunction – April 21
– Oil sands investments by state-owned bank ‘not sound’, say UK greens
– Multinational fossil fuel firms use ‘biased’ study in massive lobbying push for gas
– Really Unpopular Complicated Expensive Technological Solutions For A Nonexistent Problem
– The Big Grab: 9-part series on the economic threats to Canadians posed by the Alberta oil sands
Edible seeds making a comeback
The Willamette Valley is famous for its grass seed production, and can even boast supplying the World Cup soccer fields in South Africa. The dominance of grass seed began to wane with the collapse of the housing bubble a few years ago. And while the major shift has been towards wheat, much more is going on.
The Fukushima disaster and other irreproducible experiments
The situation at the Fukushima nuclear reactors has evolved to one of chronic catastrophe or, more optimistically, feed and bleed followed by dialysis. While we keep getting reassured that the Fukushima crisis is not as severe as Chernobyl, I will instead look a few years further back in an effort to learn something about the present dilemma. Fukushima should be more comparable to the Three Mile Island meltdown in 1979 than Chernobyl, but it has apparently left the former eating its radioactive dust. Why? Can anything be learned from this?
It’s time to outlaw land grabbing, not to make it “responsible”!
Today’s farmland grabs are moving fast. Contracts are getting signed, bulldozers are hitting the ground, land is being aggressively fenced off and local people are getting kicked off their territories with devastating consequences. While precise details are hard to come by, it is clear that at least 50 million hectares of good agricultural land – enough to feed 50 million families in India – have been transferred from farmers to corporations in the last few years alone, and each day more investors join the rush.
Communicating energy issues: a psychological perspective
It’s tough to convince people that there is a need for radical change of their attitudes and behavior in relation to energy issues. Cognitive mechanisms that produce beneficial results under most circumstances can lead to an irrational resistance (if not immunity) to any kind of argument aimed at our own set of beliefs about peaking global oil production, renewable energy resources, and the continued viability of nuclear power.
The peak oil crisis: killing off the recovery
Polls suggest that as many as 50 percent of American families have had some sort of financial setback in recent years. Into this milieu we now have added higher oil prices. Moreover, given the increasing unrest in many Middle Eastern states, continued robust economic growth in China and India will result in still higher prices before the year is out. It implies that in the not too distant future there will be another economic downturn.
Food and agriculture – April 20
-Why Food Is Still Cheap In America
-Vision — Urban Roots: Detroit’s Industrial Collapse Gives Birth to Flourishing City Gardening Movement (video)
-Nourish: Teaching About the Food System
-Food Now on Plate for All Federal Parties
Tired of Tires
…on my little one horse farm, there are 40 tires in use, not counting the ones on the car. And ten percent of them are flat at any given time. This is partly because most of my tires were vulcanized in the late Middle Ages or thereabouts. But it is also because there is something unsustainable and unnatural about riding around on air wrapped in a substance that comes from trees that grow half a million miles away.
