Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Celt Schira Lemme start with letting my alter ego, Hamster, review the narrative in the style of my fellow Vanderbilt alumnus, Joe Bob Biggs of “Joe Bob Goes to the Drive In” fame, then the geek engineer can get to appropriate technology.
With an aggressive campaign focused on advertising, lobbying, and political contributions, America’s coal industry has succeeded in beating back a challenge from environmentalists and clean-energy advocates. The dirty truth is that Big Coal is more powerful today than ever.
There was a difficult choice of entertainment for me on Thursday night. We had a meeting about the cuts here in town organised by the the Socialist Workers Party while Channel 4 was advertising a professional butchery job on the green movement. I think I made the right choice: I spent Thursday evening watching John Schlesinger’s 1967 film version of the Hardy classic Far From the Madding Crowd.
U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt once noted that “civilized people ought to know how to dispose of the sewage in some other way than putting it into the drinking water”.
A weekly roundup of peak oil news, including:
-Oil and the global economy
-The US elections
-Iraq
The first and second laws of thermodynamics should also be called the first and second laws of economics. Why? Because without them there would be no scarcity, and without scarcity, no economics.
You know, knowing the nature of the disease is usually an essential first step to finding a cure. And so too, it is with a recession. Knowing the true nature of a recession goes a long way in helping us to avoid falling into another one. Particularly when the recession we are just coming out of happens to be the deepest global post-war recession on record.
Money, like other aspects of life, has become controlled by distant organisations who, as the recent economic turmoil has demonstrated, do not necessarily have our best interests at heart. As the New Economics Foundation put it, our economies have become like ‘leaky buckets’, money that should be staying and circulating locally being sucked out to distant corporations and shareholders. This all adds to our vulnerability in times of increasing uncertainty, rather than reducing it.
The oft-discussed 10,000 mile Caesar Salad, used to illustrate the degree to which our food system is drenched in fossil fuels, really is only a piker when it comes to the spaces that food can make you cover.
– 6 casualties of the world food crisis (cabbage in Korea, garlic in China, corn in the US…)
– Shutdown of two small cheesemakers raises doubts about food-safety legislation
– Global food crisis forecast as prices reach record highs
– Podcast on food security
– Interview with Vandana Shiva
– Food Security for Europe (online publication)
– US Coal to Gasoline Plant Will be the Largest in the World
– New Exxon talking points
– SCSU professor eyes oil deposits in study
– Energy analyst Charles Maxwell: brace for $300/barrel oil
– An Update on All Things Transitioney and French
– Round-up of What’s Happening out in the World of Transition (Brazil, US … )
– Dinero contra energía fósil: La batalla por el control del mundo (online Spanish translations)
– Bem-Vindo ao Pico do Petróleo (new Brazil peak oil website)
