Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
kalpa It seems to me that there is a growing momentum of thoughtful debate over the realities of local food production versus industrial agriculture. A book review from Bloomberg news provided the inspiration for a needed discussion on this subject here this week.
-Van Jones’s Ousting: A Wake-Up Call for Green Economy Advocates
-White House Official Resigns After G.O.P. Criticism
-Thank you, Glenn Beck!
-How Bad Will It Get?
-Building the Ownership Society
-China and the buzz of a pending bank default
-States of shock
-Recession moves migration patterns
A weekly roundup of peak oil news, including:
-Production and prices
-New discoveries
-Nationalism
-Briefs
Robert L. Hirsch is the lead author of a seminal report–Peaking of World Oil Production: Impacts, Mitigation & Risk Management—written for the US Dept. of Energy’s National Energy Technology Laboratory (DOE, NETL) and released in early 2005. He has remained very active with respect to his concerns about peak oil. ASPO-USA’s Steve Andrews tracked him down last week and posed some questions about the report, then and now. Bob will be a presenter at the ASPO-USA conference in Denver next month (October 11-13).
While Europe attempts to eke out some freedom from Russia’s gas monopoly, Russia tries to free itself from the “curse of plenty.”
-How on Earth Can We Feed 8 Billion People?
-Solar Power from Space: Moving Beyond Science Fiction
-Johnson announces awards for ‘low carbon zones’
-The Cruel Cost of Clunkers
-How to Grow Democracy
-Bike-o-rama: A Roundup of the Best in New Bikes, Bike Infrastructure, Blogs, Books and More
India’s Ministry of Environment and Forests has released a quick set of five studies to support the Indian government’s claim that it can quickly grow its economy without destabilising emissions negotiations. The intention is clearly to take a ‘scientific’ stand at the Copenhagen meeting in December to project the central government objective of steady GDP growth. Although India’s climate arguments versus the west are allied with China’s, the People’s Republic has publicly been more diplomatic.
A weekly update from a UK perspective.
The Mondragón Cooperative Corporation (MCC), the largest consortium of worker-owned companies, has developed a different way of doing business—a way that puts workers, not shareholders, first.
-Climate Change, Drought and India’s Looming Food and Water Crisis
-Half India’s land degraded: agro-chemicals partly to blame
-Delhi trade talks face familiar foe as India’s farmers prepare to protest
A common refrain today is how ‘the government’ needs to do something; the openly voiced belief that those in authority hold all the power, while the ‘common folk’ are merely cogs who have no strength to change anything…It is the power of people – not ‘the’ people, merely people in general, as a whole, who are willing to stand up in defiance of this short-sighted and greedy behavior. It is their courage in the face of an oppressive, world-straddling civilization, one built upon exploiting the poorest to benefit the richest, that now stands as the battlefield in the age-old struggle between the kingmakers and the common folk.
