Tom Whipple

The peak oil crisis: Dimming of the globe

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Late last month a web site, www.energyshortage.org, dedicated to collecting articles concerning energy shortages around the world reappeared on the web after an absence of some months. The stories deal with coal, electricity and natural gas shortages as well as oil. In the course of the past month the web site has located and linked to nearly 200 stories that deal with some aspect of the developing global energy shortage. Most of these stories come from local paper and taken together paint a distressing picture of looming societal breakdown in many parts of the world that is not as yet generally appreciated by the public.

Food & agriculture April 28

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-How can we grow more food locally? Pam Warhurst of Incredible Edible Todmorden speaks in Bath (video)
-Australia’s “Grain and Graze” Farming Method Provides Peak Oil and Climate Change Resiliency
-Organic agriculture: deeply rooted in science and ecology
-Effects of input management and crop diversity on non-renewable energy use efficiency of cropping systems in the Canadian Prairie (report)

Economic Resilience #4. Resilience-building businesses and industries

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In the past 20-30 years, the concept of “outsourcing” has stripped most of our local communities of the butcher, the baker, and the candlestick maker – the craftsmen, merchants, and artisans who have skills and know-how to provide the basic goods and services we need for everyday living. Even in these times of economic contraction, supporting our local businesses is essential, because with the transportation limitations that will come with the end of cheap oil, local will become our mainstay.

Breaking the real population taboo

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No explanation of the environmental crisis gets more exposure than the claim that it is all caused by overpopulation. The view that really doesn’t get such coverage is the anti-capitalist alternative, the argument that the crisis is caused by a social and economic system that has waste and destruction built into its DNA.

The Oil Crunch

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In just a century, we’ve become almost entirely dependent on cheap oil. We rely on oil for just about everything, in fact the global economy is reliant on its free flowing supply. So what would happen if the well started to run dry and demand outstripped supply? Some oil industry experts think we’ve already hit Peak Oil and we should brace ourselves for the imminent Oil Crunch.

There’s Something Happening Here…

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Put these things together — a tone of hopelessness in the mainstream progressive media, a largely useless outpouring of outrage in the indymedia, a giving up of citizens on the viability of centralized representative governments, reactionary responses to black swan events instead of constructive ones, the ratcheting up of existing systems to prolong the period before tipping points, and a naivete about the powerlessness of even the most powerful in modern complex systems — and what do we have?