Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Staff – Climate change and Green Economy in Abu Dhabi conference
– Report recommends ways for Lawrence (KS) to fight ‘peak oil’
– Book examines the roots of America’s longing for the land
– Mixed media: Guy McPherson’s personal journey
– New Survey of 1,000 Young and Beginning Farmers Reveals What the Next Generation Needs
– Fruit trees coming to an Unley street near you
– Wes Jackson: Can we restore the prairie — and still support ourselves?
– Farm Bill Hackathon
In fact, once an American starts to slip downward, a variety of forces kick in to help accelerate the slide. An estimated 60% of American firms now check applicants’ credit ratings, and discrimination against the unemployed is widespread enough to have begun to warrant Congressional concern. Even bankruptcy is a prohibitively expensive, often crushingly difficult status to achieve. Failure to pay government-imposed fines or fees can even lead, through a concatenation of unlucky breaks, to an arrest warrant or a criminal record. Where other once-wealthy nations have a safety net, America offers a greased chute, leading down to destitution with alarming speed.
It’s all too easy to feel that hope is lost. But with your help, we’re determined to make 2012 the year that resilience built.
2011 has been another turbulent year … looming behind it all — increasingly acknowledged, but still not often addressed — resource, environmental, economic, and social constraints.
For Post Carbon Institute, the question has not been, “What to do?” but rather, “What to do first?” There are so many challenges, all of them interrelated, and so many areas that need attention. Building on the wise counsel of our Fellows, Board, Advisers, Allies, and Supporters, PCI has developed three primary strategies:
Welcome to our second annual list of the top ten peak oil books. Most of them are explicitly about peak oil, while others deal with energy depletion as a significant factor in the economy or the environment.
There are many uncertainties to how a European collapse might unfold, but Europe is at least twice as able to weather the next, predicted oil shock as the United States. Once petroleum demand in the US collapses following a hard crash, Europe will for a time, perhaps for as long as a decade, have the petroleum resources it needs, before resource depletion catches up with demand.
Europe is ahead of the United States in all the key Collapse Gap categories, such as housing, transportation, food, medicine, education and security. In all these areas, there is at least some system of public support and some elements of local resilience. How the subjective experience of collapse will compare to what happened in the Soviet Union is something we will all have to think about after the fact.
The big oil news this week was that OPEC came to an agreement – albeit a bit of a fudge– showing something of a recovery from June’s “worst meeting ever”. Last time around the group failed to agree new quotas and was upstaged two weeks later by the IEA releasing strategic reserves to offset loss of production from Libya.
I used to think a lot about starting a Christmas tree farm. Hilly cheaper land could be used and I had some, machinery investment would be low, or so I thought, and the customer would maybe do the work of harvesting. What stopped me was what I took to be the insane human desire for the “perfect” tree.
An extensive study by the U.S. Environment Protection Agency (EPA) has concluded that highly toxic and cancer-causing fluids from shale gas drilling most likely contaminated shallow groundwater in Pavillion, Wyoming. The findings, which strengthen the hands of those calling for a public inquiry on B.C.’s shale gas industry, contradict industry claims that hydraulic fracturing “is a proven technology used safely for more than 60 years in more than a million wells.”
Transition is so important because it is about doing things, engaging the community, starting to create and model the economy we do want to see. Across the world, Transition initiatives are doing just that…they are starting to model the kind of economy for which there is much more support. Yes it needs support, it needs investment, it needs that money currently being spent on bypasses and new roundabouts, and it needs to be far more visible on the ground. Portas puts it beautifully in her report, “what really matters, what’s really important, is that we roll up our sleeves and just make things happen“. Indeed.
As The Big Engine That Couldn’t has faltered for several years, it is becoming increasingly clear the economy is running off the tracks. Both investors and the public are beginning to realize the long-revered goal of endless economic growth is failing. Anger and fear are widespread, as the livelihoods and hopes of ordinary Americans are being destroyed. Anger runs among the “99%” over economic injustices that favor the “1%”. Fear, however, may run among 100% over this question: How do we live when economic growth fails?
Difficult as the message is to hear it seems to me that it is essential that the popular mobilisations of outrage and emotion against the banksters are informed by the fact that there are three crises, not one. There is certainly a crisis of the financial system largely created by a massive amount of elite fraud during the “euphoric economy” of the bubble years. However there is also a crisis of uneven development where competitive imbalances between many parts of the world have reached their outer limits. Also, probably most important of all, there is a crisis caused by the global economy reaching the limits to economic growth — with constraints in resource availability, and destructive pressure on overused ecological sinks. Let’s look at the last two, taking the growing competitive imbalances first.
