Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Staff – Glenn Beck embraces simplicity (for real!)
– 21 Holiday Gift Ideas for the Permaculture and Guerrilla Gardening Activists in Your Life
– NYT: The Beekeeper Next Door
– The UK Crash Course… now online and available free to all UK Transition initiatives…
– Why not eat insects? (video) – new!
There is growing evidence that prices of staple foods, like maize, rice, and wheat will rise steadily due to increased population and income growth. And climate change adds more pressure to these already big challenges.
Oil reached a two year high above $90/barrel this week before falling back on mixed economic news. A growing list of analysts including JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs and Barclays Capital are now forecasting prices above $100/barrel in 2011…
The UN Climate Conference (COP16) in Cancun is turning out to be both anti-climactic and anti-climatic. There will be no major agreement to stop global warming this week, despite the timed release of a number of reports that show that the phenomenon is advancing more rapidly than expected, with lethal consequences. There likely will be announcements of progress in schemes to allow contaminating industries and nations to continue with business as usual and add another lucrative area to their portfolios—trade in carbon offsets and credits. It’s a worst-case scenario for the planet.
The efficiency with which people and goods move into and within cities has a huge impact on both energy use and air quality. And the availability of non-driving modes of transportation can improve people’s lives in a lot of ways.
– A Case Study in Web Survivability
– Live with the WikiLeakable world or shut down the net
– Massive Release of Raw WikiLeaks Files Threatened if Assange Harmed
– WikiLeaks avoids shutdown as supporters worldwide go on the offensive
– WikiLeaks, the web and the power of the people
– WikiLeaks a blueprint for things to come
– How to Think About Wikileaks
– Shell boasts it has infiltrated Nigerian government
– WikiLeaks climate change cables
– Wikileaks Reveals Hushed Concern Over Tar Sands Oil in US State Dept.
– Bolivian Ambassador Pablo SolĂłn Responds to Secret U.S. Manipulation of Climate Talks
– WikiLeaks: oil deal executive ‘was paid ÂŁ46,000 a month’
As Urbanization Week continues, Liz Borkowski put up a great post about feeding cities that includes a nice, rational discussion of the idea of Vertical Farming. I’m glad to see the issue come up, because it has so much power. We have a strong taste for complex and expensive, especially when it looks cool – generally speaking, and in an era of cheap energy and economic stability, there’s at least an argument for doing the complicated fancy thing – first, you can, second, the results are more elegant than what you can generally get without complexity. But in a society with major economic constraints and facing the reality of less, rather than more available energy for consumption, complex and expensive becomes not only a bad idea, but infeasible.
“The only preventive and the only remedy is for the people to choose one another, and their place, over the rewards offered them by outside investors.”
The world’s leading climate scientist, Dr James Hansen, is sick and tired of the dirty energy lobby’s stranglehold on Washington. That’s why Congress can’t pass a sensible energy policy. Even worse, Big Oil and Big Coal have forced the US to block the world from taking real action to slow climate change. So Hansen is now looking East for leadership, to China. But can Beijing see that it’s own interest is to save the world?
The yawning gap between the real world and the discipline and profession of economics has never been wider.
“Most of the food people eat is processed,” says Left Coast Naturals president Ian Walker. This simple truth sums up what may be the biggest hurdle for our local food system in feeding the masses.
