Staff

The Saudi Arabian Protectorate of Bahrain

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Bahrain wouldn’t seem to have a lot to offer, except that it seems to offer something for a million people (half of which are guest workers) living on a desert island. Why is it generating so much interest? Is there any oil left there? In this article, I will discuss some recent developments between Bahrain and its neighbors in the context of its long history.

Reinventing the informal economy

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When the formal economy fails, the informal economy is needed – and yet we have stripped the informal economy over the last decades. How to rebuild is a huge question – and one whose radicalism can’t be overstated. It involves completely reinventing our economy, among other things, since the domestic informal economy stands against industrial growth capitalism and undermines the idea that we can have economy based largely on consumer spending. If you make, rather than buy, well, that changes a lot of things.

Strategic petroleum reserves: The world’s last ‘swing producer’ tries to save the economy

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Global leaders are now implementing another stimulative measure that they hope will prevent the economy from teetering over into recession once again: lowering oil prices through the coordinated release of 60 million barrels of oil into the market from government-run strategic petroleum reserves. The move seemed to have the desired effect as oil prices fell more than 5 percent after the announcement. The question is: Why did they wait until now?

New book: “The Limits to Growth Revisited”

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Writing this book has been a fascinating work. Re-examining the story of “The Limits to Growth” opens up a whole new world that urban legends and propaganda had tried to bury under a layer of lies and misinterpretations. We all have heard of the “mistakes” that the authors of LTG, or their sponsors, the Club of Rome, are said to have made. But LTG was not “wrong”: nowhere in the 1972 book you find the mistakes that are commonly attributed to it.

Lies Our Leaders Tell Us – “Nobody Could Have Predicted”

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There has been a lot of commentary within the peak oil movement as of late noting that the concept seems to be creeping ever closer to mainstream acceptance. While we should be heartened that the logic of our arguments is finally beginning to shine through the fog of denial and obfuscation, we also need to remind ourselves that we still have a long way to go before any major political leader will be willing to come out and flatly acknowledge the truth. So how will we know when that happens? I suspect it will be when we hear this phrase uttered in connection with peak oil: “Nobody could have predicted…”

Brown to green: A new use for blighted industrial sites

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Few places in the U.S. are as well suited to developing renewable energy as the contaminated sites known as “brownfields.” But as communities from Philadelphia to California are discovering, government support is critical to enable solar and wind entrepreneurs to make use of these abandoned lands.

ODAC Newsletter – June 24

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The oil market was plunged into turmoil as the IEA announced it will tap its strategic reserve for only the third time ever. The agency had hinted in the past months that it might be prepared to release stocks to offset the shortfall in production from the Libyan crisis, to calm prices and avoid a “hard landing” for the global economy.

Radical homemaking, radically enriching

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When I finally got a copy of Hayes’s book, Radical Homemakers, I confess it wasn’t what I expected–rather than a serious, theoretically grounded critique of consumer culture, family life, and the structural obstacles that often stand in the way of adopting a simpler, more communal lifestyle, I found an often sloppily researched but nonetheless impassioned instruction manual-cum-rallying cry.