Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Staff -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
The latest release from Richard Heinberg’s upcoming book—working title The End of Growth. What are the limits to debt, and how close are we to hitting them?
The latest round of price spikes in food crops and petroleum sparked a corresponding round of predictions insisting that collapse can be expected shortly. Behind these claims is a foreshortening of historical perception that makes short term variations seem more important than the broader and slower patterns that drive them. Still, there’s one detail these claims get right; it’s now possible, with a fair degree of certainty, to put a specific date to the beginning of America’s catabolic collapse; the Archdruid explains.
“If you want to know ‘is climate change something that should be on my radar screen?’, then you end up with some very solid results. The climate is warming, and we can say why. Looking to the 21st century, all reasonable projections of what humans will be doing suggest that not only will the climate continue to warm, you have a good chance of it accelerating. Those are global-scale issues, and they’re very solid.”
I was at my local watering hole one night talking to a professor at Carnegie Mellon University when, after several libations, I suddenly heard myself exclaiming when did everybody get stupid? By stupid, I did not mean mentally slow or impaired. Rather, I meant ignorant or untrained to think. As with so many other things, I believe you can lay this at the feet of a culture dominated by corporations, aka. the “consumer” society.
There is powerful information waiting to be unleashed in water data. If it were set free it would force us to re-think how we use, develop, sell, transfer, and dispose of water.
So what should we do? We must be explicit about why we want good domestic climate and energy policy. Let’s say that it is needed to achieve peace and stability. Let’s say that climate change and competition for dwindling energy reserves are both causes of instability and violence. We should make it clear that there the other causes of instability and violence – like nuclear proliferation and inequality – need to be dealt with too. Finally let’s be very clear that our vision for renewables and good domestic climate policy is totally inconsistent with the dominant approach to security.
Last week, three official forecasters the IEA in Paris, the EIA in Washington, and the OPEC Secretariat in Vienna, released new forecasts of global oil prices and the availability during the next two years. This may be a critical time for global oil production which is hardly growing at all; and consumption in some parts of the world has been increasing rapidly.
As I said in my book on this topic, this would all have made perfect sense to F.H. King, whose remarkable 1911 book, Farmers of Forty Centuries, goes into great detail about how Asians at that time produced more food per acre than we do now with all our modern and very expensive fertilizers except maybe on our best raised beds. Manure, animal and human, was their main fertilizer. Chinese farmers had to lock and guard their vats of manure to keep it from being stolen.
A report launched today by the Lean Economy Connection, commissioned by the All Party Parliamentary Group on Peak Oil, calls for a nationwide system for ensuring fair and equal access to fuel as energy scarcities develop. The report, entitled Tradable Energy Quotas, sets out a detailed proposal for a scheme which would ensure fair and equal entitlements to fuel and energy under conditions of scarcity, while also guaranteeing that the government meets its commitment to an 80% reduction in carbon emissions by 2050.
British owners abandoned their tea estate at Mineral Springs near Darjeeling shortly after India gained independence in 1947. The few hundred families living there took control of the land, living a mostly subsistence lifestyle until about ten years ago when residents formed a dairy cooperative that delivered goods milk and yogurt to Darjeeling. Now SVC grows organic teas on the former plantation that are marketed by Massachusetts-based Equal Exchange under a Fair Trade label.
Consider King’s powerful words about the civil rights struggle, which echo today in the climate battle: “We are faced with the fact, my friends, that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history there is such a thing as being too late. Procrastination is still the thief of time. Life often leaves us standing bare, naked and dejected with a lost opportunity. The ‘tide in the affairs of men’ does not remain at the flood; it ebbs. We may cry out desperately for time to pause in her passage, but time is deaf to every plea and rushes on. Over the bleached bones and jumbled residues of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words: ‘Too late.’”
