Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Lester Brown Heat waves clearly can destroy crop harvests. The world saw high heat decimate Russian wheat in 2010. Crop ecologists have found that each 1-degree-Celsius rise in temperature above the optimum can reduce grain harvests by 10 percent. But the indirect effects of higher temperatures on our food supply are no less serious.
The Carbon Tracker initiative is a new way of looking at the carbon emissions problem. It is focused on the fossil fuel reserves held by publically listed companies and the way they are valued and assessed by markets. Currently financial markets have an unlimited capacity to treat fossil fuel reserves as assets. As governments move to control carbon emissions, this market failure is creating systemic risks for institutional investors, notably the threat of fossil fuel assets becoming stranded as the shift to a low-carbon economy accelerates.
If freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose, then revolution could be just another word for nothing left to eat.
A midweekly roundup of peak oil news, including:
-Developments this week
-The IEA’s monthly report
One of life’s mysteries for me is why country people have inevitably migrated to the cities in every civilization that I have studied. In the United States, where there has been little of the kind of violent upheavals that send third world countries into instability, the reasons for migration to cities seem especially specious to me.
If this world is to learn anything about the day-to-day realities of adapting to–and rejoicing in–the resources that living and eating in a more limited, more localized–and therefore often healthier and tastier–environment may provide, then we need more men like Leroy.
Non-violent direct action is not the most glamorous occupation in the world. Unpaid overtime, long hours, maligned by a biased mainstream media, widely misunderstood by the middle classes and opposed by a heavy state apparatus, who could be blamed for thinking environmental activism to be a mugs game. But when the audience at a London preview of “Just Do It: A Tale of Modern Day Outlaws” was asked if they had been inspired to take up direct action after watching the film, many hands waved in the air.
The economy is closely linked with the physical resources that underly it. Most economists assume debt can rise endlessly, just as they assume GDP can rise endlessly. But if there really is a limit that prevents oil supply from rising endlessly, it seems to me that there is also a corresponding limit that prevents debt from rising endlessly.
One thing I learned from plants, I said to Dan as we headed home to Suffolk and resumed our discussion about roadside herbs, is that whatever you experience in the company of the plant that is the medicine. What makes the medicine is the looking back on that experience afterwards, the dialogue you hold about it and the story you then tell the world. So after the whirlwind three days in Liverpool what is that story?
The tin production story is out there is in plain sight, but only those directly involved in supplying the tin ore, refining it or consuming tin metal are paying any attention. Bloomberg’s Bear Market in Tin Ending as Shortages Mean PT Timah’s Profit Advances 55% explains what’s going on now, and what’s been going on for years now…
As Europe and the United States each engage in a classic game of chicken, using sovereign debt in place of more ordinary vehicles, the declining credit ratings of an assortment of governments have deep and subtle links to a more pervasive decline in the quality of goods and services available across the industrial world. The first stirrings of the salvage economy of the future offers one way to counter that process.
A reader, who asks to remain anonymous writes me that her graduate school boyfriend (soon hopefully to be fiance) has decided he wants a farm. What, she asks, do farmers wear? Despite the fact that I have no fashion sense to speak of, I did, in fact, coin the term “slow clothing” and am the official founder of the “slow clothing movement.” Thus, although my clothing motto is (stolen from the late, great Molly Ivins) “Woman who wears clothes so she won’t be nekkid,” I do, in fact, get emails every year during fashion week from Milan, which just shows that the universe is a very weird place ;-)). With these qualifications (ie, none) I do feel I can help our reader – perhaps not by telling her what to wear in her new life, but by offering guidelines about what *not* to wear.
