Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Steve Levine Members of OPEC will agree to increase their official production today, but that won’t do much to lower prices — the plenitude of energy-related stress across the globe underscores more than ever how power has dispersed out of OPEC’s hands. It’s not only the civil war in Libya, and the loss of its 1.4 million barrels a day of oil exports, or the chaos in Yemen. From the South China Sea to Alberta, Canada, tempers are flared over the control and movement of oil.
The first part of this article, Imagining Sustainability, discussed some of the institutional, social, and psychological barriers in Western societies that “continue to thwart meaningful measurable change”. It also highlighted failings of population-scale information campaigns intended to motivate such change and indicated the better potential for small group and inter-personal approaches that engage deeper values-based motivation in overcoming unsustainability. This second part considers in more detail some small group non-formal education approaches that show potential to achieve and maintain community-level shifts to sustainability.
Whenever a salmon, bear, lodgepole or Dow Jones company spends more energy on an activity than they get back, death follows. Or in corporate terms, debt builds and things fall apart.
Pathetically the media has been awash with New York Congressmember Anthony Weiner’s string of electronic sexual peccadillos. Punctuating the sensationalism, and between the TV commercials from the oil, gas, coal and nuclear industries, are story after story of extreme weather events. Herein lies the real scandal: Why aren’t the TV meteorologists, with each story, following the words “extreme weather” with another two, “climate change”?
Danish director Michael Madsen’s ‘Into Eternity’ masterfully debunks industry claims that nuclear power is ‘clean’ energy. And its deadpan Nordic style and lush cinematography is hauntingly beautiful, creating a meditative mood on the deeply troubling topic of nuclear waste. English and Finnish with subtitles. 75 minutes.
Recent suggestions that the current boom in natural gas will be a bridge to a future of sustainable energy are highly reminiscent of similar claims from the past — claims that turned out to be entirely wrongheaded. A bridge is only useful if there’s somewhere to get to on the other side, and in the future ahead of us, the other side will inevitably be defined by much less energy use. With the help of a photovoltaic panel, the Archdruid explains.
Despite the fact that you have a life, a job, a family, volunteer responsibilities and enough backlog in your life to keep you busy until 2182, you’ve decided that you are going to do food preservation too. This means finding time to do so, and that isn’t easy. It helps to plan for the realities of the harvest – and this is planning that applies both to people with gardens who may now be planting, and people who plan to put up food from local farmers.
As supply and demand factors increasingly point to a future in which natural gas plays a greater role in the global energy mix, the International Energy Agency (IEA) on Monday released a special report exploring the potential for a “golden age” of gas. The new report, part of the World Energy Outlook (WEO) 2011 series, examines the key factors that could result in a more prominent role for natural gas in the global energy mix, and the implications for other fuels, energy security and climate change.
For all the People is a magnificent, comprehensive and detailed history of co-operatives and collectives of all kinds in the USA.
Chancellor Angela Merkel surprised many with her May 30 announcement of a complete shut down of all Germany’s reactors by January 1st, 2022 and the shutdown of 14 of Germany’s total of 17 reactors well before that date. The German chancellor has, in nine months, gone from touting nuclear plants as a safe “bridge” to renewable energy and easing regulatory constraints on extending reactor lifetimes, to pushing the biggest and fastest nuclear exit strategy in any country using nuclear power.
As much as anywhere in the United States, South Bend has prospered by capitalizing on the promise of the commons — which means assets belonging to all of us, from water and wilderness to the Internet and cultural treasures. The commons also refers to a new ethic of sharing and cooperation that can help solve pressing problems of the 21st century, advocates say. This ethic has come to influence decision making at all levels in South Bend, bringing big changes to city hall, businesses and neighborhoods.
Could Rob Hopkins become the US right wing’s next Van Jones? Could the Post Carbon Institute become the next ACORN? A new video from the Tea Party attacks the Transition movement and fingers both Hopkins and PCI as part of a United Nations plot to “take away your land.” Silly? For sure. But given how much money from big polluters is behind such attacks, we ignore them at our peril.
