Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Michael D. Lemonick Some skeptics have suggested the real culprit behind rising temperatures is increased solar activity. But a wide variety of data and experiments still provide no solid evidence to refute the scientific consensus that greenhouse gas emissions are the major reason the planet is heating up.
When one considers one’s actions as activism, done for the purpose of creating social, political, or economic change, and not just personal fulfillment, it behooves one to have a “theory of change.” The “anti-capitalist” theory of change holds that solutions to market failures can’tt come from the market (recalling Einstein, “We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them”), and this is hard to square with a “green economy” theory of change, which believes that a capitalist economy can be reformed, through business, into one that is less destructive to people and the environment.
Having learned “How Much Food Can I Grow Around My House?” (Peak Moment 87), Judy Alexander kept right on going. As chair of the Local 2020 Food Resiliency Action Group in Port Townsend, WA, she helped initiate 25 community gardens in her county within four years. Sitting in her own neighborhood’s garden, she talks about the power of cooperative gardens compared with individual plots. There’s something for people of all ages and skills to do (even non-gardeners), while enjoying learning from one another, and building closer neighbors and a more secure community.
The wave of chain store consolidation now underway adds new urgency to calls for a reinvigorated antitrust policy and a return to the idea that a competitive economy is one made up of lots of competitors, many of them small and independent.
The ear of corn is one awesome seedhead and growing the stuff is fairly easy, all things considered. That’s the whole problem. Corn is sort of like sex. It is such a wonderful thing that it is easy to carry to excess.
The spiralling economic contraction we can expect as the impact of peak oil grows stronger poses a particularly sharp challenge to the institutions of modern science, which are already facing budget cuts and a widening loss of social influence and prestige. In a future where pumping money into research projects simply won’t be an option any more, the survival of the scientific method as a way of solving problems is arguably up for grabs — but there are options for salvaging it.
At the moment I’m using the Internet, as are you. In many ways, the Internet is the largest and perhaps most successful global system ever built by humanity. And yet because of the way it was built—haphazardly, over the course of a few decades—there are no maps, no records documenting its entire structure. Recently a colleague and I did a holistic study, the first of its kind to our knowledge, to understand the energy and embodied energy use of the Internet. Here I’d like to report on what we found.
The Riot for Austerity came about this way. In 2007, after the release of the IPCC report, and a number of books drawing attention to climate change, a friend of mine and I were discussing our frustration that no political organization was considering any kind of emissions cuts that even resembled those necessary to limit the damage from climate change. In fact whenever we discussed the 90+% emissions cuts required to give us the best chance of a reasonable stable climate, the immediate reaction was “that’s not going to happen!”
We set two goals. First, we would spend a year trying to get our emissions down by 90% over the American average. Second, we’d use this as part of a larger public strategy to point out that it can be done – that we don’t have to wait for political action – indeed, that we can’t wait.
“…I am putting all of the pieces together in order to launch a national brand of locally grown produce—everything from the most efficient hydroponic growing systems, brand identity, USDA [United States Department of Agriculture] support, political allies, relationships with institutional buyers, and investors. I want to redirect some of the capital flows in the food business to revitalize underutilized industrial space and people.”
Richard Heinberg chats about his new book The End of Growth.
This week’s interview is one of the most important discussions we’ve had to-date on energy, its supply/demand dynamics, and the tremendous impact it has on our economic and social identity. It is clear now that we are staring at a future of declining output at a time the world is demanding an ever-increasing amount. Nate Hagens, former editor of the respected energy blog, The Oil Drum, gives a fact-packed update on where we are on the peak oil timeline. But interestingly, he explains how he sees the core issue as less about the actual amount of energy available to the world, and more about our assumptions about how much we really need…
Economists insist that recovery is at hand, yet unemployment remains high, real estate values continue to sink, and governments stagger under record deficits. Richard Heinberg propose a startling diagnosis: humanity has reached a fundamental turning point in its economic history. The expansionary trajectory of industrial civilization is colliding with non-negotiable natural limits.
