Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Janaia Donaldson Be the first in your group to get your Undriver License™ — it’s great fun! You pledge to reduce automobile use — yours or others’. Seattle founder Julia Field’s creative project is sparking imaginations and creativity by changing how people think about getting around — be it skateboards, sailboats, or just plain skipping the trip! Undrivers of all ages are jumping on the bandwagon, changing assumptions, and telling their empowered stories.
– The Coming Green Wave: Ocean Farming to Fight Climate Change
– A Quiet Push to Grow Crops Under Cover of Trees (NYT on food forests)
– That’s Not Trash, That’s Dinner
The following question ought to be an obvious one to anyone who knows that Canada imports 43 percent of the oil it consumes: Why isn’t there any discussion of a new pipeline to eastern Canada where most of the oil consumed is imported?
Not everyone can eat cheaply in the ways I am proposing. Single parents with multiple jobs, homeless folks, those living in shelters or in motels with limited cooking facilities and those with no cooking skills at all have more limited choices. Still, many of us can do this – it isn’t terrifically time consuming or that expensive. Moreover, eating cheap means mostly eating lower on the food chain and focusing on what’s available with a minimum of packaging or processing and in season. Cheap eating can be a gift for all of us if we have the good fortunate to have a home or a place we can cook and store food – at the same time, let us recall that we are blessed, because not everyone does..
The growth stimulating strategy only buys time (and buys it at a high price). Nothing that governments or financial traders do can change the thermodynamics of the world system – all what they can do is to shuffle resources from here to there and that doesn’t change the hard reality of depletion and pollution. So, pushing economic growth is only a short term solution that worsens the problem in the long run.
Hall and Day (2009) report that the Energy Return on Energy Invest (EROI) for coal might be as high as 80 and that for hydropower, EROI is 40. Does this mean that coal is twice as ‘good’ as hydro? The answer is no, and in this post I will discuss how this relates to the idea of an EROI Threshold
Has ExxonMobil — the annoyingly prissy schoolboy who always obeys the teacher — risked weakening one of its distinguishing pillars in order to break into a single oil patch? And if so, could that shake up the global oil market along with geopolitics?
We are referring to the news, indiscreetly disclosed by a Kurdistan official last week, that the northern Iraqi region has signed an oil exploration agreement with Exxon. The reason this is a problem is that Kurdistan has been in a long-standing turf war with the folks in Baghdad over how to divide the spoils from its hydrocarbon riches.
– CO2 sensitivity possibly less than most extreme projections
– Ice age analysis suggests global warming may be less severe than predicted
– Chris Huhne: a new global climate change treaty is not a luxury
– At Durban, the Big Emitters Will No Doubt Fail Us Again on Climate Change
To the extent that liberals cling to the notion of demand as the source of all economic problems, their thinking will become increasingly irrelevant to future debates. In a way that is equally alarming, conservative economics, even it its most naïve and populist forms, are more likely to find a prominent place in serious discussions about the economy in this future. The conservatives have ventured on to the near side of the supply and demand equation, though in a highly troubling way.
– Rules of Engagement for Non-Profits and Unions Working with the #Occupy Movement
– Stan Goff: A Million Gardens (for the 99% of the 99%)
– Naomi Wolf: The shocking truth about the crackdown on Occupy
It’s another edition of Monday Mayhem, where talk radio hosts Rob Roper and Carl Etnier are guests on each others’ shows. Roper hosts Common Sense Radio on WDEV, Waterbury, Vermont, and the show’s focus is “improving the economic well being (sic) of Vermonters through reliance on free markets, limited government, and fiscal responsibility.” Etnier hosts the Monday edition of Equal Time Radio, focusing on energy, food, and the local economy at the end of the age of oil. The theme this Monday Mayhem is Occupy Wall Street.
While there has been much discussion in terms of Transition and diversity over the past few years, little has been said about the issue of age. It’s not something we’ve explored here at Transition Culture in the past. Sometimes it is suggested that Transition only appeals to older people, whereas Occupy, for example, tends to attract more younger people. But is that the case? Is it that straightforward? How might Transition best serve people at the different stages in their lives, and what might they, in turn, bring to it? What are the things that attract people of different ages and what do they hope to get out of their engagement?
