Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Ugo Bardi Barbastro seemed to be willing to tackle wider questions and to ask unmentionable questions; for instance, do we really own everything in this planet? If we are justified in poisoning people in order to produce combustible liquids and gas, why don’t we jump to the ultimate consequence and turn human corpses into oil? Some talks in Brussels were frankly scary, but in Barbastro some presentations made you feel like running away screaming.
– Sharing and caring: the implications of collaborative consumption
– Going Local: Across the U.S., Communities Are Forming “Transition Towns”
– “Happy” – the movie
– Documentry “EARTH: The Operators’ Manual” now online and on PBS (video)
As much as I would love to see anti-retroviral drug access expand in Africa, and continued lifespan increases across the globe, I’m not at all sure that I think these presumptions, particularly the assumption of continued economic expansion and access to the trappings of middle class life for more people are realistic. To the extent that population growth has depended on fossil fuel growth and the economic expansion it fuels, we must ask what the future of population is in a world of material limits.
– Alaska’s Peak Oil Realities
– Iraq halves oil output (target) as reality replaces ambition
– Peak oil appears in NPR blog
– EU Plans Measures to Tackle Resource Crunch
– Neue DERA-Kurzstudie zu schweren Seltenen Erden: Entwicklung “Grüner Technologien” durch kritische Versorgungslage gefährdet
– Oil’s Plunge, Dollar’s Rise Trigger Broad Selloff
– It’s Time for Obama to Spook the Oil Markets (by opening the SPR)
– Michele Bachmann is wrong about oil
All empires are threatened by real joy. The empire does not want to change, it wants to hold on to its power, its monolithic marketplaces. It is terrified to experience its own ugliness and lack of heart, its human vulnerability.
At some point in the future, perhaps even that soon, politicians and Administrators are going to complain “but nobody told us!!” and rush to blame the industry yet again. But the truth is that there was a group that was keeping the records, and who could tell those with the responsibility to fix it that there was a problem. And the Administration just closed it down. We will regret that lack of information and the warning messages that it would have brought.
-Goodies and baddies
-Humanitarian intervention: whom to protect, whom to abandon
-The theory and practice of humanitarian intervention and the interest of western powers: Liberia, Darfur, Rwanda, Iraq, and Libya
-On Small Farms, Hoof Power Returns
-Bringing Sustainability Home
-Upcycling: 2011’s greenest decorating trend
-Brixton Windmill reopens after restoration
-EU unveils plans to pay fishermen to catch plastic
-National Trust’s Wimpole Home Farm seeks online farmers
According to The Times, Iraq’s oil ministry is to reset its oil production target for 2017 reducing it down from 12 million barrels per day to between 6.6-7 mb/d. The news is of no surprise to anyone (with the possible exception of Donald Trump)…
Perhaps the most dramatic example of how oil and water don’t mix can be found in the middle of the planet’s great oceans and seas in the form of litter gyres, rotating currents laden with countless bits of floating debris, mainly plastic and Styrofoam, all of which were pushed to the middle of these great bodies of water by the currents that circle them.
Obviously, the bright green, manicured lawn is a human invention – Mother Nature certainly doesn’t use a lawnmower. So where did the grass lawn come from? Why do we work so hard to keep it green?
