Brian Kaller

Sauerkraut

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In all its forms, [cabbage] remains one of the best crops for the Irish climate, as for similar climates like the Pacific Northwest, but it grows in a wide variety of climates. It’s a famous staple here in many of its forms, the basic vegetable of many dishes. Amazingly, though, few people we know here make sauerkraut or kimchi, methods used in other parts of the world to preserve cabbage, make it easier to digest and to give it flavour. You can make sauerkraut very easily at home, and it will be much tastier and more nutritious than the canned variety.

Energy security

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So what should we do? We must be explicit about why we want good domestic climate and energy policy. Let’s say that it is needed to achieve peace and stability. Let’s say that climate change and competition for dwindling energy reserves are both causes of instability and violence. We should make it clear that there the other causes of instability and violence – like nuclear proliferation and inequality – need to be dealt with too. Finally let’s be very clear that our vision for renewables and good domestic climate policy is totally inconsistent with the dominant approach to security.

An epidemic of ignorance

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I was at my local watering hole one night talking to a professor at Carnegie Mellon University when, after several libations, I suddenly heard myself exclaiming when did everybody get stupid? By stupid, I did not mean mentally slow or impaired. Rather, I meant ignorant or untrained to think. As with so many other things, I believe you can lay this at the feet of a culture dominated by corporations, aka. the “consumer” society.

The peak oil crisis: it’s not adding up!

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Last week, three official forecasters the IEA in Paris, the EIA in Washington, and the OPEC Secretariat in Vienna, released new forecasts of global oil prices and the availability during the next two years. This may be a critical time for global oil production which is hardly growing at all; and consumption in some parts of the world has been increasing rapidly.

Human manure shops are a hot business in North Korea

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As I said in my book on this topic, this would all have made perfect sense to F.H. King, whose remarkable 1911 book, Farmers of Forty Centuries, goes into great detail about how Asians at that time produced more food per acre than we do now with all our modern and very expensive fertilizers except maybe on our best raised beds. Manure, animal and human, was their main fertilizer. Chinese farmers had to lock and guard their vats of manure to keep it from being stolen.

Can we trust climate models? Increasingly, the answer is ‘yes’

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“If you want to know ‘is climate change something that should be on my radar screen?’, then you end up with some very solid results. The climate is warming, and we can say why. Looking to the 21st century, all reasonable projections of what humans will be doing suggest that not only will the climate continue to warm, you have a good chance of it accelerating. Those are global-scale issues, and they’re very solid.”

Let’s talk about bees

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Our bee problem is quite the topic of conversation these days–at social gatherings, in meetings, over coffee. I could say and have—for example at Christmas dinner when apologizing for my not-quite-stellar pumpkin bread—that last summer the CSA grower from whom I get my produce planted five hundred pumpkin plants and only got three pumpkins (so I had to buy canned, rather than processing my own). No pollination, he thought. And just the other day an acquaintance mentioned that friends who live in a tony suburb north of Chicago had, also last summer, had their own pollination troubles in their vegetable garden. Why? she wondered.

I have a dream

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Consider King’s powerful words about the civil rights struggle, which echo today in the climate battle: “We are faced with the fact, my friends, that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history there is such a thing as being too late. Procrastination is still the thief of time. Life often leaves us standing bare, naked and dejected with a lost opportunity. The ‘tide in the affairs of men’ does not remain at the flood; it ebbs. We may cry out desperately for time to pause in her passage, but time is deaf to every plea and rushes on. Over the bleached bones and jumbled residues of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words: ‘Too late.’”

TEQs Tradable energy quotas: A policy framework for peak oil and climate change

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A report launched today by the Lean Economy Connection, commissioned by the All Party Parliamentary Group on Peak Oil, calls for a nationwide system for ensuring fair and equal access to fuel as energy scarcities develop. The report, entitled Tradable Energy Quotas, sets out a detailed proposal for a scheme which would ensure fair and equal entitlements to fuel and energy under conditions of scarcity, while also guaranteeing that the government meets its commitment to an 80% reduction in carbon emissions by 2050.