Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Helena Norberg-Hodge In the industrialised world today, most of us feel overwhelmed by a seemingly endless series of crises. The climate is changing; conflicts rage around the world; the global economy may be on the verge of collapse. On a more personal level, we are experiencing what appears to be an epidemic of psychological disorders. Few of us are completely untouched by the increasing rates of depression and a pervading sense of isolation and low self-esteem.
A front-page story in the Washington Post might have considered other reasons why growth has not led to more employment, besides simply claiming that growth has been “too slow.” First, the jobs that workers would have gone back to have largely been off-shored as employers sought cheap foreign labor. Second, cheap foreign labor by way of illegal immigration seems to have been welcomed by U.S. employers trying to fill the remaining jobs at home. And third, jobs have been “outsourced” to the consumer (the ultimate source of cheap labor), who is now his own checkout clerk, travel agent, baggage handler, bank teller, gas station attendant, etc.
A weekly roundup of peak oil news, including:
-Oil and the global economy
-The Macondo well
-Briefs
The threat of inflation comes not from any conscious policy on the part of central bankers or even most central governments who have already made their iron-clad allegiance to the wealthy classes abundantly clear. Rather the threat of inflation comes from the eventual exhaustion of government credit in the face of an intractable and unstoppable deflation brought on by continuous deleveraging of companies and households.
So long as we see ourselves standing on a cliff’s edge, we’ll keep swinging unproductively between visions of full spectrum catastrophe and wishful thinking—a kind of circular paralysis—while real opportunity goes unnoticed. It feels a little like motion, but never gets us anywhere.
This week on Crop To Cuisine. We speak with Curt Ellis of the award winning documentary, King Corn, about his new projects, Food Corps and Truck Farm. Carol O’Meara joins us to help with the harvest. And Aubrey White is with us for another installment of From The Ground Up, our exploration of the adventures facing the New American Farmer. All that, headlines in food and farming, and more.
Wednesday saw the release of BP’s Deepwater Horizon Accident Investigation report – the company’s version of the events that led to the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig. BP admits responsibility for some of the list of technical and human failures which it says led to the disaster, but also heaps blame on both the rig owners Transocean and contractors Halliburton…
According to a recent article in the Royal Society’s journal Philosophical Transactions B, agricultural areas that typically experience extreme weather events every “one in 20” years will see an average rise in temperature of 3 degrees Celsius (4.8 ˚F) by 2050. And most places “will be hotter by 1 to 3˚ C.” This could increase the intensity of drought or floods and their effects on agricultural production. But the several articles that discuss climate change provide no firm conclusion on the effects of changing temperatures on crop yields and resource availability in different countries.
The World Banks long-awaited report on land grabs is out. I’ve not had time to study it — I only found out an hour ago — but here are some first impressions.
It would be heartening to think that there could be trust regained in place of the fear, what is it that those who honour ownership above all else fear? And from whence came the sense of alienation from one another, and the sense of entitlement of one above the other?
Two think tanks, on different sides of the world, published peak oil reports earlier this month – generating very different levels of media and web coverage. It would be a pity if the Australian version is overlooked, as it provides a remarkably balanced overview of the whole peak oil debate.
The enthusiastic professionals in Paris report that: “Global oil supply fell 250 kb/d to 86.8 mb/d in August, as non-OPEC output dipped to 52.4 mb/d on seasonal maintenance in Canada, the UK and Russia.” As often, the agencies don’t completely agree on what’s going on, with OPEC now seeing July as only a partial restoration of production cuts in June, but the IEA still seeing it as taking production to a higher level. But both concur that August is now below the level of February.
