Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Staff – The American Conservative: Mainstreaming Bicycles
– New York’s transportation chief is a latter-day Robin Hood
– The ‘War on Cars’: A brief history of a rhetorical device
– Seven Rules for Sustainable Communities
– Yglesias on Peak Oil
– Rising prices rekindle peak oil debate (Jaccard vs Heinberg)
– A shoppers guide to energy choices
2011 blew in with strong echoes 2008 as food and fuel prices rose strongly. The UN warned food prices are reaching “dangerous levels” as the global food index rose above the level that caused widespread rioting three years ago, and the IEA’s Fatih Birol cautioned rising oil prices could derail the economic recovery. WTI is around $88/barrel and Brent crude almost $94.
Energy is actively debated on several fronts these days. The Gulf of Mexico oil spill, drilling in the arctic, and the Alberta tar sands spark debate about the environmental wisdom of continued oil exploitation. Climate change is caused mainly by the combustion of fossil fuels, something that goes on at a spectacular rate around the world. Peak oil – meaning the maximum possible global production rate of conventional oil – has entered the mainstream discussion after a decade of lurking in the shadows. But judged by policy discussions about our energy future, wood heating is virtually nonexistent.
Researchers disagree about what the economic costs of climate change will be over the coming decades. But the answer to that question is fundamental in deciding how urgent it is to take action to reduce emissions.
And so the combination of peak oil and extreme weather is likely to create growing food insecurity this decade, particularly since the nation and the world have decided to take no action to address either problem.
-The Legacy of David Suzuki
-China’s Grey Swan is changing colors
-Capitalism and Degrowth—An Impossibility Theorem
-The Oil – Employment Link, Part 1
Right here in the desert southwest, in fact, one of the last great “common pool resource” systems in North America provides irrigation water and open grazing land to farmers and pastoralists. Derived from the imported culture of Spanish settlers (via the Arabic Moors who brought the concept to Iberia previously) and combined with the best practices of the native peoples of the region, the acequia system is a powerful example of how we might envision people working together not only with each other but with the land itself.
With the global oil markets tight and prices rising, any new source of demand could easily have an outsized impact on oil prices in the next few months, right down to what you pay for gasoline at your local pump. As the global energy markets become tighter and tighter, a flood on the other side of the world is enough to trigger off a shock wave that will be felt everywhere.
It started with a conversation among members of a women’s farming group in Affe Tidiane, a small village in the Kaolack region of central Senegal. “The leader of the women’s group said we should have a meeting and ask everyone what they wanted to do,” says Helen Fallat, a Peace Corps volunteer working in the village in 2007 and 2008. “I thought that sounded simple enough.”
In May of 2009, U.S. federal legislation created the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, charged with investigating the causes of the financial crisis that led to the largest economic downturn since the Great Depression. The Commission’s report is due in January. But don’t get your hopes up; they’re more than likely to get it wrong.
-World Food Prices Enter ‘Danger Territory’ to Reach Record High
-The city that grows
-How will growing cities eat?
-Peak Fertilizer?
