Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Staff Saudi Arabia announced this week that it is halting its $100bn oil expansion programme, claiming that the requirement for the kingdom to increase production has “substantially reduced” in the face of emerging new oil and gas supplies.
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.
Talk about stockpiling food brings home the seriousness of the situation, the potential for disorder to descend on our society with terrifying speed. The threat of chaos and awareness of how close it is, triggers panic, an instinct to flee, to jump around, lose all sense of place and direction. Oooft. Stop and breathe. The scary thing about Transition is that so many well-informed, intelligent individuals share the conviction we’re on extremely dangerous ground. It would be such a relief to be able to dismiss it as a paranoid delusion.
A back-up propane stove and an outhouse are not testimonials to resilience. They are merely some extra tools to draw upon if your home is blessed by a massive stroke of good fortune that leaves it standing while those around you are destroyed. No amount of toilet paper, backyard vegetable plots, or canned tomato sauce could help a household suddenly flooded with eight feet of water. That is not to say these things aren’t extremely important. Our “toilet paper preparedness” kept us safe and comfortable so that resources could go to help those who were not. It empowered us to help folks around us. But canned produce, outhouses, and a backyard garden are merely surface-level survival tools. Surviving a true community disaster requires resilience at a far more profound depth.
For years, governments, industry, and TV ads told us natural gas is the safe bridge fuel while we move away from dirty coal and oil. Cornell University scientist Robert Howarth wondered “Is that true?”…Program includes 27 minute speech by Professor Robert Howarth of Cornell at ASPO USA 2011, November 2nd in Washington D.C. recorded by Carl Etnier of Equal Time Radio, Vermont…Then a follow-up interview this week with Robert Howarth, to fill in his hurried climax of the speech…that methane emissions, when calculated over 20 years…could add up to at least 44% of all greenhouse gas emissions in the United States!
The last two months of posts here on The Archdruid Report have focused on the murky interactions between the crisis of the industrial world and the deep structures of our minds — and the ways in which those deep structures have been manipulated by marketers and advertisers at the bidding of competing political and economic interests. Abstract as though these issues may seem at times, they link up directly to the most practical issues we face at the end of the age of cheap energy — and the link between them has very often been the missing piece in proposals for dealing with the challenges of the future.
It has been interesting to observe so many commentators dispensing advice to the participants of the Occupy movement, telling them what they should or should not be doing. I have also seen this happening with Transition: activist pundits, one after another, issuing proclamations about how the Transition movement is too much this, or not enough that. The latest of these critiques can be found in Luane Todd’s recently published article on Energy Bulletin on November 23, titled, Why Occupy has Taken Off.
A midweekly roundup of peak oil news, including:
-Developments this week
The Occupy movement, unlike the peak oil/climate/Transition movement (?) is a bottom-up not a top-down approach. That appeals to the younger people and many of the older ones as well. What they are doing is not coming in the form of ‘delivered wisdom’ from the ‘experts in the field’ with their laundry list of what we ‘must’ do.
This paper by Hyun Song Shing, Global Bank Glut and Loan Risk Premium, has already been flagged by Paul Krugman and Tyler Cowen a couple of days back, but with rather brief commentary. I found the paper absolutely eye-opening and wanted to alert my readers to it with more emphasis – if you hadn’t already gotten this perspective somewhere else it’s very important to take it on board in thinking about the world.
I love Buy Nothing Day. I’ve celebrated it since it was first announced twenty years ago by the same band of merry activists who launched the Occupy Wall Street movement.
Ten thousand years ago, ancestors of today’s Coquille Indians lived along the southern Oregon coast from Coos Bay to Cape Blanco and along the inland valleys of the Coquille River drainage. A common misconception among European Americans is that Indians lived passively within their environment, “at one with nature.” On the contrary, aboriginal peoples actively managed their landscape for their own objectives, using the technologies available to them.
