Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Michael Klare Rising food prices leading to riots, protests, and revolts, mounting oil prices, mammoth worldwide unemployment, and a collapsed recovery — it looks like the perfect set of preconditions for a global tsunami of instability and turmoil. Events in Algeria and Tunisia give us just an inkling of what this maelstrom might look like, but where and how it will next erupt, and in what form, is anyone’s guess.
Blackout offers scholars and activists an overview of projections on future coal production and their complexities, but social movements will need to look elsewhere for what is to be done about the historical burden of our coal question.
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So here’s the point: you must not face the future alone. Find your own “reality support group” (we’ll tell you how below). This year, make a resolution to deepen your relationships with people around you with whom you can face what’s coming down the pike.
The purpose of TEQs is not to limit the consumption of individuals per se, but rather to share out fairly the shrinking energy budget required by national circumstances, and to allow maximum freedom of choice within that.
Mission failure. The Energy Information Administration (EIA) is funded by American taxpayers to warn about energy issues. Every Wednesday the EIA publishes This Week in Petroleum (TWIP).
-Biofuel jatropha falls from wonder-crop pedestal
(references new Friends of the Earth report)
-U.S. okays ethanol boost for more cars
-US offers $650m in loan guarantees for second-generation biofuel
-Court challenges stall new biofuel crops
With last November’s election there are new governors, state legislatures, and a very different U.S. House of Representatives. The issues of budget cuts, tax reform, corruption, the global financial collapse and the rise in unemployment are high on the agenda. We have an opportunity to shape the debate on these issues and bring the steady state economy into the discussion.
A weekly roundup of peak oil news, including:
-Oil and the global economy
-Iran’s nuclear program
-China
-Unrest in the Arab World
-Quote of the week
-Briefs
How can we be required to purchase what already belongs to us? Such a plan was not part of the election campaign and has no public mandate, but how might resistance be most effectively organised? …my suggestion is that we lobby our local authorities to revive our ancient woodland rights.
-IEA doubles global gas reserves estimates
-Shareholders challenge gas companies on fracking
-Gasland: the review
-UK government rejects calls for shale gas moratorium
It’s not surprising then that food and energy experts are beginning to warn that 2011 could be the year of living dangerously — and so could 2012, 2013, and on into the future. Add to the soaring cost of the grains that keep so many impoverished people alive a comparable rise in oil prices — again nearing levels not seen since the peak months of 2008 — and you can already hear the first rumblings about the tenuous economic recovery being in danger of imminent collapse. Think of those rising energy prices as adding further fuel to global discontent.
During a presentation last week a questioner asked me what I thought about predictions that gasoline prices would reach $5 a gallon this summer. I offered this critique. I said that the oil prices implied by $5-a-gallon gas could probably not be attained in such a weak global economy. And, something short of that price would probably send the economy into a tailspin.
