Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Adam Voiland In a new NASA analysis, motor vehicles emerged as the greatest contributor to atmospheric warming now and in the near term. Cars, buses, and trucks release pollutants and greenhouse gases that promote warming, while emitting few aerosols that counteract it.
Oil supply optimists claim that new technology combined with private development of the world’s remaining oil resources–most of which are now under the control of government-owned companies–would vastly increase global oil production and put off any decline for decades. Texas oilman Jeffrey Brown isn’t buying it, and he cites the history of oil production in Texas and the North Sea to explain why.
A midweekly roundup of peak oil news, including:
-Prices and production
-Venezuela
From time to time sailing ships get mentioned as one technology that will serve in post petroleum scenarios but some readers may not know that there are already hundreds in service worldwide, maintaining a tradition of moving goods and people across water that goes back 400 centuries. By contrast, our recent epoch of fossil fueled ships stands out as a brief and brilliant blip in a continuum of what may turn out to be humankind’s most enduring form of transport.
-Rehearsals for a Civil War
-Athens: The First Domino?
-Our world balances on a sea of debt
-Joseph Stiglitz: Bankers Made Reckless Bets on the Economy, Knowing Taxpayers Were Going to Pick up the Tab
-Finger on the Scale
-Secret AIG Document Shows Goldman Sachs Minted Most Toxic CDOs
…The Culture of Maximum Harm tries to achieve its journey by taking as much as it possibly can, and by doing as much damage as it possibly can. And the reason it does this is because it has one primary goal, which is achieve continuous growth – and that’s economic growth, in terms of the word “growth” – and economic growth cannot be sustainable. So, this culture, which I believe is unique in human history, is doing something that is uniquely destructive. In other words, it is the Culture of Maximum Harm – it is the most harmful way that humans can exist.
-Does Facebook deserve the hell it’s catching from Greenpeace?
-Saudi Arabia to export solar power soon, US says
-Energy expert Lovins brings conservation message
-The new wave: Harnessing the power of the ocean
-Health: the challenge of improving nutrition
-Small family farms in tropics can feed the hungry and preserve biodiversity
-Jonathan Safran Foer: the truth about fish farming
-Scientists unite to combat water scarcity; solutions yield more crop per drop in drylands
-Potatoes, Not Just Pistons, Take Root in Detroit
-She Farms
-New Investments in Agriculture Likely to Fail Without Sharp Focus on Small-Scale ‘Mixed’ Farmer
Nobody knows what will happen when an oil-producing member of the global economy in the middle of the Middle East implodes into worthlessness,… and then runs out of water, but in Yemen, we are going to find out.
Last week I attended the annual conference of the Ohio Ecological Food and Farm Association (OEFFA), spending the day signing and selling books and gabbing with people. Those of us who remember the early days of OEFFA were stunned and jubilant at the overflow crowd. … There was something electric in the air. I could feel it. At meetings of industrial farmers these days, the talk is fairly bleak, but here, among new farmers and gardeners with a hundred new ways to produce food and sell it locally, the people just seemed to glow with optimism.
Here is the first part (Part Two to follow tomorrow) of an interview I did with Tim Kasser a couple of weeks ago while he was at Schumacher College. He is a psychologist, author of the seminal High Price of Materialism, as well as other useful writings such as a great chapter in the State of the World Report 2009 about consumerism and climate change. The interview raises some fascinating areas for research and thoughts about Transition and psychology, and I think you’re going to enjoy this one….
The predicament of industrial society unfolds to a large extent from its mishandling of energy issues. Because of that, the laws of thermodynamics — and no, to borrow a phrase, they’re not merely suggestions — have to be taken into account in any attempt to make sense of the economics of the approaching deindustrial age.
