Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Gene Logsdon I don’t hear anyone explicitly suggesting that the culprit in our economic woes is money interest even though all of our major religions, particularly Christianity and Islam, insisted for centuries that interest on money was immoral. ALL interest on money was usury. And supporting that view, philosophers and writers from every culture and era cautioned over and over again the folly of borrowing money.
In my earlier post a few days ago, I wrote about the background to the widespread privatisation of public space. In this second part I look at some of the activist and political responses.
Money and energy have always been linked. For example, a gold currency was essentially an energy currency because the amount of gold produced in a year was determined by the cost of the energy it took to extract it. If energy (perhaps in the form of slaves or horses rather than fossil fuel) was cheap and abundant, goldmining would prove profitable, and a lot of gold would go into circulation enabling more trading to be done.
It happens that just hours before, Adbusters magazine—which originally called for the occupation—promulgated “Tactical Briefing #18: Occupy the High Ground.” It suggested that perhaps the time has passed for the movement to be so focused on encampments, and that it might move on to bigger and better things instead. This is a notion that has come up repeatedly in my recent conversations with early organizers; after almost three months, they feel, the movement is starting to outgrow the occupation.
In an epoch when going to extremes has become one of the most popular habits in American culture, the very idea that a middle ground might be a more sensible place to stand is about as popular as garlic aioli at a vampire convention. Still, the obsession with binary thinking that’s done so much to back America and the industrial world into its present corner is unlikely to get us back out of it. With the help of a Greek philosopher, an Austrian mystic, and two famous California cities, the Archdruid explores some of the alternative territory.
If we adopt solar and wind as major components of our energy infrastructure as we are weaned from fossil fuels, we have to solve the energy storage problem in a big way. An earlier post demonstrated that we do not likely possess enough materials in the world to simply build giant lead-acid (or nickel-based or lithium-based) batteries to do the job. Comments frequently pointed to pumped hydro storage as a far more sensible answer. Indeed, pumped storage is currently the dominant—and nearly only—grid-scale storage solution out there. Here, we will take a peek at pumped hydro and evaluate what it can do for us.
-A farewell to pavements
-WikiLane – How citizens built their own bicycle network
-Local Economic Implications of Urban Bicycle Networks
– Police Clear Zuccotti Park of Protesters
– Court Order: City Can’t Keep Protesters Out of Zuccotti Park
– Did Bloomberg do Occupy Wall Street a favor?
– Press Suppression at Occupy Wall Street Raid
Many argue that what we’re suffering from is an ‘evolutionary mismatch’ in that our hunter-gatherer brains haven’t caught up with modern real-time problems such as climate change. What we are currently wired to respond to are immediate and easily perceived threats, like stampeding buffalo. According to acclaimed Stanford biologist Paul Erhlich — in his paper Human Natures, Nature Conservation and Environmental Ethics — our nervous systems have perceptual constraints making it difficult for us to comprehend the very real threat of a planet that is slowly heating up.
Richard Douthwaite, economist, environmentalist, co-founder of Feasta and much-loved colleague and friend, died on Monday November 14th after a long illness. We will miss his unique and far-ranging intellect, the clarity of his thought and writing, his warmth and his laughter.
Funeral arrangements will be posted on the Feasta website.
US production of crude oil peaked in 1970 at 9.637 mbpd (million barrels per day) and has been in a downtrend for 40 years. Recently, however, there’s been a tremendous amount of excitement at the prospect of a “new era” in domestic oil production. The narratives currently being offered come in the following three forms: 1) the US has more oil than Saudi Arabia; 2) the US need only to remove regulatory barriers to significantly increase production; and 3) the US can once again become self-sufficient in oil production, dropping all imported oil to zero.
– Why I quit the mainstream media
– Oakland Mayoral Adviser Tells Keith Olbermann Why He Quit
– Faces Of Zuccotti Park: The Columbia Economics Professor
– Occupy Wall Street and the U.S. Labor Movement
