Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Lars Schall James K. Galbraith belongs to the most distinguished economists in the United States today. In the following exclusive interview that was conducted for New Deal 2.0 in the USA and MMNews in Germany, he talks about the financial / economic crisis and the phenomenon of Peak Oil, points at future tasks and explains why he supports the Audit the Fed bill.
Jeff Rubin, former chief economist at Canadian investment bank CIBC World Markets, is not your typical economist. He gets peak oil…And now, in his bestselling book Why Your World Is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller, he argues that oil prices, temporarily dampened by the deepest post-war recession on record, will soon be vaulted to new highs as the economy begins to recover, which in turn will thrust the world into yet another recession right on the heels of this one.
What started out as a case of The Emperor’s New Clothes now has America looking like the world’s biggest nudist colony, with everyone in the long chain of power and authority admiring each other’s splendid new (imagined) pimp suits. George W. Bush (remember him?) wasn’t kidding when he discounted the function of objective reality in our national life, saying, “we make our own reality.” This apparently hasn’t changed much with a new chief at the top.
-Windfarm boost for north-east industry
-China Leading Global Race to Make Clean Energy
-Government to reward renewable energy homes with higher feed-in tariffs
-IMF plans $100bn injection into economy to fund energy efficiency
-Wind Power Grows 39% for the Year
-Powering a Green Planet: Sustainable Energy, Made Interactive
-The oil world and its villains
-Interview: Joel Salatin
-What are your top green books?
-We Need a Food Revolution: Oprah with Michael Pollan (VIDEO)
-DIRT! The movie
-The No Money Man
-Isaac Asimov: The Nightmare Life Without Fuel
Firewood as a residential heating fuel is rarely mentioned in energy policy discussions. When discussed at all, the conversation usually centers around how to restrict wood burning because of the pollution created by users of bad equipment and bad fuel. But considering its many advantages, a better strategy would be to promote the ways its smoke emissions can be reduced.
Calculated Risk is an assiduous updater of official government statistics and other economic indicators. He’s very good at what he does, and provides well-informed comment, especially on the housing market, with every story he posts. But let’s investigate the statistical recovery that CR has been reporting. If the recovery is only in the data, but we still have a human recession, surely that implies that the data does not reflect reality. Surely it implies that the data is measuring the wrong thing.
-Butterfly effect could cause financial chaos
-Coal and Treasuries
-Carbon Currency: A New Beginning for Technocracy?
-Why we’ll pay for China’s car obsession
Picture this: A remote Indian village in the Ganges delta a few hundred years ago. The farmer starts his day by letting his flock of ducks into his irrigated fields. The water from the river brings with it, besides nutrients and alluvium, some unwanted (for the crops) pests too. But that is not a problem–the ducks will keep the pests in control. Not only that, they will turn those pests into manure and drop it right inside the pool of collected water to be anaerobically decomposed under the water.
I was speaking today with a mom at my sons’ school. She was concerned about a teacher who was doing such a poor job that even his students were complaining that they weren’t learning enough…This collective economic angst, I believe, is what Caitlin Flanagan played into in “Cultivating Failure,” an article that lambastes school gardens in the January/February 2010 Atlantic. But to separate the angst from the facts, it is necessary to first look at the angst and then the facts.
A mass emailing went out a while back from a prominent permaculturist looking for “projects where people are fully self sufficient in providing for their own food, clothing, shelter, energy and community needs. . .” There it was, the myth of “fully self sufficient,” coming from one of the best-known permaculturists in the world…But even self-reliance is barely possible, and, other than as way of expressing a desire to throw off the shackles of corporate consumerism, I don’t think it’s desirable.
Many of you watched President Barack Obama’s recent State of the Union speech…It is the position of Post Carbon Institute that the President, however well-intentioned, is overlooking critically important considerations.
In the open letter below, we call on President Obama to face reality and ask our fellow Americans to do the same. We are seeking the support and endorsement of our community…
