Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Pat Murphy Reviewing the numbers on the Transition U.S. and U.K. sites is a useful indicator about its future growth and just how “viral” it is. Brownlee’s comment led me to peruse these sites. They show an initial increasing rate of growth and then a decelerating rate of growth
You have seen food prices going up at the local grocery store. That could be just the beginning. According to Lester Brown, a leading expert in both the environment and world agriculture, those bulging supermarket shelves are part of a “food bubble”, which could crash. Brown compares our world food situation to the real estate bubble in the United States.
There is no durable sanctuary from economic growth. Any park that is made by legislation can be unmade by legislation. Governments change and so do circumstances. But growth continues and natural capital shrinks. And things are not even desperate yet.
BP increased its exposure to the ‘wild east’ this week through a new joint venture with the state-owned Russian oil giant Rosneft. Given the rocky history of its existing joint venture, TNK-BP, the deal illustrates the risks BP has been forced to take to gain access to meaningful oil resources…
The Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination is not an institution or a group, not a network nor an NGO, but an affinity of friends who recognize the beauty of collective creative disobedience…Creation and resistance are the entwined DNA strands of the Lab’s practice. It sees art and activism as inseparable from everyday life. Its experiments aim not to make art but to shape reality, not to show you the world but to change it together.
Facing up to imminent peak oil and runaway climate change, the UK could start rationing fuel within ten years. Rationing sounds scary. But it’s much fairer than the alternative, which is to let high prices determine who drives and who doesn’t. And the Brits’ innovative plan for Tradable Energy Quotas would reward energy conservation while softening the blow of higher costs. Meanwhile, the US continues to be in denial about both climate and energy depletion. Is there any way this British plan could come to Washington?
-Fueling the Food Revolution: CoFed to train New Generation of Student Leaders
-How Sweden turns human body heat into useful energy
-Vision: 8 Reasons Global Capitalism Makes Our Lives Worse — And How We Can Create a New Kind of Economy
-The Ultimate Oxymoron: Industrial Civilization And Mental Health
– Nicole Foss: We Need Freedom of Action To Confront Peak Oil (video)
– La Niña as Black Swan – Energy, Food Prices, and Chinese Economy Among Likely Casualites
– The Guardian: The population explosion
– Jerome a Paris: Neo-feudalism and neo-nihilism
For more than twenty years, microcredit has been widely heralded as the remedy for world poverty. Recent news stories, however, have sullied microcredit’s glowing reputation with reports on scandals, exorbitant compensation to managers, skyrocketing interest rates, and aggressive marketing schemes.
Population: One planet, too many people? is the first report of its kind by the engineering profession. Unless the engineering solutions highlighted in the report are urgently implemented then the projected 2.5 billion more people on earth by the end of this Century (currently there is 6.9 billion) will crush the earth’s resources.
A midweek roundup of peak oil news, including:
-Developments this week
-IEA calls for increased OPEC output
In all its forms, [cabbage] remains one of the best crops for the Irish climate, as for similar climates like the Pacific Northwest, but it grows in a wide variety of climates. It’s a famous staple here in many of its forms, the basic vegetable of many dishes. Amazingly, though, few people we know here make sauerkraut or kimchi, methods used in other parts of the world to preserve cabbage, make it easier to digest and to give it flavour. You can make sauerkraut very easily at home, and it will be much tastier and more nutritious than the canned variety.
