“Localization is the Economics of Happiness”
“The number of Americans who say, ‘Yes, I’m very happy with my life’ peaks in 1956 and goes slowly but steadily downhill ever since.”
Brooke Jarvis
Bill McKibben: Climate change is our most urgent challenge
Bill McKibben, author and founder of the international environmental organization 350.org, says that without a global campaign to curb climate change, the ecological devastation of our warming climate will make our planet uninhabitable. His appeal to citizens and policy-makers, the seventh video in the series “Peak Oil and a Changing Climate” from The Nation and On The Earth Productions, is a call to action as much as it is a sobering account of the damage we’re already doing to our environment.
Peak oil notes – Feb 17
A midweek roundup of peak oil news, including:
-Developments this week
-Budget struggles in Washington
Inner greening
Many of us just turn off when confronted by looming predicaments, and why not? What in the world can we do? Quite a lot, says Carolyn Baker. Not to save civilization, but to prepare, in our hearts and minds, for its possible or impending decline.
Energy efficiency leads to higher CO2 emissions?
Increasing the energy efficiency allows us to pay a higher price per unit energy. This enables higher ultimate production of fossil fuels with their associated CO2 emission to the atmosphere.
Urge Obama to say “peak oil” on April 20
Several prominent organizations dealing with peak oil, have just launched a petition drive urging President Obama to mark the anniversary of the Gulf spill with a major speech to the American people on the subject of peak oil.
Unrest spreadin’ all over the world?
-Is Wisconsin Our Egypt? 15,000 Protest Off-the-Wall Right-Wing Governor’s Policies
-Unrest Spreads, Some Violently, in Middle East
-Revolution on the Nile: Lessons for Africa
-Oil rises to $104 a barrel amid Middle East tensions
-A New Sense of Populist Empowerment Grips the Middle East
-Bahrain: why it matters to Saudi Arabia
The orgacity of hope
One of the questions I encounter most frequently is how the vision for a sustainable society we are developing in the market town of Stroud might be applied to the cities where most of the world’s population now live. This is a troublesome question for me, because I have never enjoyed the city, with its concrete and anonymity, but from an ecological perspective no question is more important.
A real chance to cut subsidies to Big Oil?
Oil subsidies of nearly $40 billion will be on the block if Democrats have their way. And though the GOP and the industry claim cutting the handouts will cost American jobs, a former Shell CEO says that when prices are high enough, Big Oil doesn’t need help. What’s for sure is that, to have any hope of getting America prepared for peak oil, we’ll need an energy policy that stops encouraging people to use more of the oil that we’re already running out of.
Energy: What really matters
Current discussions of renewable energy resources often fixate on finding replacements for the highly concentrated fossil fuels and abundant electricity that plays so large a role in contemporary lifestyles in the industrial world. The forms of energy that are actually required to maintain a comfortable human life, by contrast, are food and relatively diffuse heat for cooking, water heating and space heating, and these latter are much easier for individuals to provide for themselves using renewable resources. Moving away from dependence on concentrated energy, however, requires certain adjustments — one of which involves facility with a caulk gun.
Heating With Wood Is An Eco-Crime?
Even as I write this, Wendell Berry and other courageous people have emerged victorious after protesting to the governor of Kentucky about mountaintop removal. The governor wouldn’t speak to them, so they staged a sit-in in his office, risking arrest, until he did meet them. I should have been with him. I don’t have the courage or the patience. My way of protest is sneakier. I just fire up the wood stove.
Year one of the global commons movement
Whatever we do, whatever we produce – we need common pool resources. So, the very question we have to answer is: What do we want to do with them? Do we want to produce commodities and convert everything – our collective knowledge, our genes, solar energy, public arenas and spaces, water, beaches, social care, etc. – into commodities? Or do we want to sustain and reproduce them as commons? It’s our choice.
