Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Tom Whipple Although world oil production is likely to start declining in the next few years, followed by world coal production in another 20 or so years, neither of these are likely to reduce emissions enough for many decades to have much of an impact on increasing carbon emissions. The decline in world oil production and much higher prices are likely to have a major impact on economic growth however.
As an unstable economy and reduced resources persist and worsen, more and more people will experience the exigencies of decline. In terms of health care, much can be done to mitigate the effects through evolved expectations and planning for the change. This article reviews adaptations in transportation, facilities, and models of care needed to meet coming challenges.
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) on Monday made its long awaited announcement regarding greenhouse gases. In this post, I highlight a few of the sections of the announcement and findings that caught my attention.
The recently published and expanded fourth edition of The Transition Document: Toward a Biological Resilient Agriculture by Harry MacCormack is arguably his most important work in a long and winding career of poetry, politics, farming, writing, and spiritual discovery.
As world leaders meet at Copenhagen to avoid taking action about climate change, it’s crucial to recognize that the industrial world’s repeated failure to confront the limits to growth is woven into the foundations of our collective life. In this first part of three, the Archdruid explores the political barriers that make a failure to meet the challenge of climate change the only option on the table.
-Copenhagen, Day Three, from Tuvalu to Todd Stern
-Copenhagen day 1: Scandal! Bullying!
-Met Office reveals last decade was the hottest ever recorded
-The millionaires who want to pay more tax
-This tax on the City is a bonus
-Tax rebate plan for ‘green’ drivers and homeowners
Industrial civilization is rapidly running out of net fossil-fuel energy — and alternative energy sources won’t be able to make up the difference. Obama knows this, but is unable to say it publicly. But if we don’t start making some basic preparations for our non-optional, lower-energy future right now, we’ll likely end up with a much lower standard of living than if we did prepare…– Heck, even an intelligent child could do a better job planning for energy descent than we’re doing now! Sasha in 2012!
Jan Lundberg moved to Portland a year ago because it seemed like the best place to pursue his intersecting passions for food security, peak oil, bicycles, and sailing. These passions will be coming to fruition later this month when the oil analyst’s brainchild, the Sail Transport Network, will launch into its first major, ongoing local venture.
-Approaching peak oil
-Copenhagen talks could leave oil industry with a sinking feeling
-IEA forecasts stir debate
-The peak oil debate: 2020 vision
I talk often with elderly relatives and neighbours from Missouri, Germany and Ireland. They all grew up in different worlds; a farm, an urban tenement, or the ruins of a bombed city. Ask them what has changed, though, and the answer is always the same: the ubiquitous presence of family and community.
Jared Diamond seems to have missed one of the central observations of his own _Collapse_ – that when societies actually avert collapse, the tend to do so with strong levels of prohibition and regulation. That is, Japan didn’t ask the gun manufacturers to self-regulate, they prohibited the use of guns entirely. The reason the Dominican Republic is so much better off than Haiti isn’t because people refined their logging practices, but because they restricted them.
