Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Sharon Astyk The recent debate between George Monbiot and Paul Kingsnorth over whether we actually can save the world seems mostly to have degenerated into sound and fury, which is rather a problem, since the larger question of whether climate change is stoppable, whether we can avoid having billions of people die, seems, well rather a good one.
A weekly round-up including:
– Prices and production
– The Saudis aroused
-As Arctic Ocean warms, megatonnes of methane bubble up
-Ocean Temperature Record and Other Clues: What Is Your Response?
-A ‘Dow Jones’ For Climate: The Case for a Warming Index
-Africa seeks climate change cash
-Top U.N. climate scientist backs big CO2 cuts, 350-ppm goal
-Think health costs are hot now? Factor in global warming
-The fallacy of climate activism
So there’s nothing new under the sun. Farming begins with small holdings and then slowly graduates to larger and larger units until it falls apart. Or starts with large holdings and breaks up into small ones and then repeats the cycle over and over again. Every generation must have its “back to the land” movement.
-Speaking At Jackson Hole
-Peak Oil: Supply Data Doesn’t Lie
-Peak Oil around 2030 says IEA (updated)
My subject today is the grotesque wealth & income inequality that exists in the United States. I have dubbed our times the new Gilded Age, which was Mark Twain’s name for the post-Civil War period when “the rich wore diamonds and many others wore rags.” I could also have called it the “last” Gilded Age because our slowly disappearing Middle Class will never exist again as it once did.
Tom Whipple, retired CIA analyst and editor of the ASPO-USA newsletter, will be a speaker at the ASPO-USA conference this October 11-13. From his home just outside Washington D.C. in Virginia, the amount of information that Tom single-handedly has gathered and circulated about the unfolding peak oil story is extraordinary.
In the world of climate policy, the argument has been shifting. It used to be between a few global warming Cassandras and hoards of global warming deniers, and that arguing got, well, pretty heated. The deniers long ago lost their argument to the hard science of the matter, so the debate has boiled down to the preventionists versus the mitigators.
-German Autobahn goes electric
-A Quiet Revolution in Bicycles: Recapturing a Role as Utilitarian People-Movers
-In Japan, bikes now use battery power
-When governments fail, the public must set the agenda
The second law of thermodynamics is the gold standard of physics, the law you can count on when all else fails. Why, then, does so much of the contemporary conversation on the future of energy ignore it? The answer is profoundly human — and profoundly troubling.
-Canada’s Oil Sands – Part 1
-Squandered Opportunity
-Health Care: Why costs spiral up
-Editorial: The Future of Coal
-Study ranks states’ vulnerability to oil prices
-‘Peak Oil’ Is a Waste of Energy
-Opec’s greed will herald the end of the oil age
