Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Staff – UK Independent: Across the World, the Indignant Rise Up
– Reason Magazine (libertarian): OWS beyond the caricatures
– Nicholas Kristoff (NYT): America’s ‘Primal Scream’s
– BBC: ‘Occupy’ is a response to economic permafrost
People working in the City of London have played a starring role in creating the global economic crisis. Since our representative institutions have thus far failed to address this crisis in a way that is both sensible and just, it is only fitting that we should use the City as a place in which work on solutions ourselves.
– Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” played for 500,000 in Spanish protest
– From the Heart of Liberty Plaza
– Ben Zolno “End of Growth” Street Seminar
– US Marine tells off NYPD
For centuries, herders have roamed the grasslands “following our animals,” as the herders’ adage goes, building, packing, and rebuilding their traditional gers, or tents, to make their living from nature’s bounty…A decade ago, herders first observed the impacts of climate change with the increase in severe weather events like storms, droughts, and extremely harsh winters, known as zud. The 2010 zud was one of the worst ever, resulting in the death of approximately 8.5 million livestock or 20 percent of the 2009 national herd.
Some are now arguing for a radical change in policy and practice: breaking down enclosures; terminating intensive land use (for example, for crop production); and reopening the grassland to collectively managed practices. Comanagement takes time and effort to become operational but, once established, becomes a driver of innovation.
Brutal police and military repression of the protests could buy time for politicians, but it would solve nothing. The unrest would go underground and tear at the social fabric, leading eventually to revolution or societal breakdown.
Reform, if it is to make a difference, must be fundamental. It must start by addressing issues of economic inequality, but then must eliminate the massive debt overhang that plagues not just governments but households and the entire financial sector. In essence, policy makers must cobble together a new economic model that meets human needs in the absence of economic growth.
Debt forgiveness is in the news and beginning to circulate as an idea which might be a solution to the financial crisis…This is important because the “Occupy” movement is growing fast and is looking for simple ideas that people could get behind to resolve the debt crisis. It seems inevitable that the idea of a debt write-off will grow and in this article I suggest a way in which a Jubilee could be administered effectively and fairly. For let us be under no illusion: merely writing off debts leaves a few problems and isn’t even that fair. As a simple solution on its own it would it leave the banking system broke and thus no payments coming out of the cash machines.
Peak Oil predictions range from the year 2000 to 2100 with the highest concentration of forecasts from 2005 to 2016. Confidence in international oil reserves data is lacking. As such, different forecasters make different assumptions about future undiscovered oil amounts and oil reserves, resulting in a wide range of peak oil estimates. Viewing this wide time disparity in forecasts as problematic, the research objective was to look for an economic cross-check indicator, metric, or alternative data-based means to corroborate or refute existing peak oil estimates.
-How India squared up to Monsanto’s ‘biopiracy’
-Study debunks myths on organic farms
-Planning reforms will threaten Britain’s ability to grow food
-Bitter harvest: migrant workers on UK farms ‘still exploited’
-Trees ‘boost African crop yields and food security’
-A New Approach to Feeding the World
– IEA chides MENA producers to increase output capacity (Jeffrey Brown comments)
– World’s top energy provider is beginning to look beyond oil
– Saudi oil Saudi energy demand to double by 2028
– Irish student newspaper tackles peak oil and climate change
A weekly roundup of peak oil news, including:
-Oil and the global economy
-The Middle East
-China
-The Oil Market Report
-Quote of the week
-Briefs
I contend that we, especially in rich countries, have reached the economic limit to growth but we don’t know it, and desperately hide the fact by faulty national accounting, because growth is our idol and to stop worshiping it is anathema.
When people lose wisdom, the easiest way out appears to them to find an enemy, Our new enemies seem to be the scientists. We haven’t seen yet climatologists being lynched by angry mobs, as it happened to Hypatia long ago – but we seem to be getting close to something like that.
