Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
John Michael Greer Social critics have pointed out with some justice that today’s industrial states are troubled, corrupt, and dysfunctional. It’s too often remembered, though, that as the pressures of resource depletion come to bear, what replaces them need not be an improvement.
In July 2009, UK Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change Ed Miliband unveiled the government’s UK Low Carbon Transition Plan, a bold and powerful statement of intent for a low-carbon economy in the UK…There is, though, a key flaw in the document, which also appears in much of the wider societal thinking about climate change. This flaw is the attempt to address the issue of climate change without also addressing a second, equally important issue: that of resilience.
Brian Moyer, the new executive director of Rural Vermont, explains how the organization plans to follow up on their legislative successes by making sure the laws about raw milk, on-farm slaughter, and other aspects of farming are working as intended and helping family farmers. City planner and designer Darrin Nordahl says cities, towns, and villages should not only let people grow food in the margins of urban areas, they should pay their staff to grow food on public land. Nordahl talks about his new book, Public Produce: The New Urban Agriculture.
So far in this series of technical talks, I have tried to explain some of the pieces that have to be put together to get crude oil or natural gas out of the ground. I intend to go on with the series in the coming weeks, but thought that today I would put some of the different thoughts that I have talked about recently together. So I am going to talk a little about reserve calculations and production and will use an example to show how the numbers are derived. And again, let me stress that this is a very simplified example. It is also only somewhat fictionalized, as I shall comment at the end.
A decade ago, Scientific American published the seminal article by these two luminaries of the Peak Oil awareness movement, that relaunched the debate on M. King Hubbert’s finds, Scientific American appears now as a completely different publication. Now, however, scientific content doesn’t seem to be a requisite for its articles. Among other eerie details, Leonardo Maugeri goes as far as citing “Common Wisdom” to present erroneous facts.
-Government failure to acknowledge the looming oil supply crunch threatens the climate and risks international conflict
-UK Report Warns of Oil Shortage
-Key report aims to tackle global peak oil crisis
-Obama at the Precipice
-Fighting the Taliban
-Is Escalation Obama’s Only Choice in Afghanistan?
-Pakistan targets key Taliban town
-Fossil Fuels’ Hidden Cost Is in Billions, Study Says
-Will EPA veto or regulate the plunder of Appalachia?
-Global Warming Accelerating While The U.S. Backpedals
-Supply and Debate
-The Next Oil Crisis is Just Ahead
-Oil prices hit high but report warns of supply crunch
-Anthropological Field Guide to Common Peak Oil Debate Participants
-Bus Powered by French-fry Fat Reaches Asia
-Video Guide to New Bike Lanes in New York City
-Off the Rails
Yesterday was World Food Day, and the media dutifully paid a tiny bit of attention to the 1 billion plus people who suffer from chronic hunger. All the usual problems were trotted out, including multiple quotations in many media from the Australian National Science Director Megan Clark’s observation that to feed a growing population, we will have to produce more food in the next 50 years than we have in all of human history.
-The ecocidal moment
-“All will be done again as it was in far-off times”
-(Re)Imperializing Anthropology and Decolonizing Knowledge Production
-Do Increased Energy Costs Offer Opportunities for a New Agriculture?
