Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Simon Evans Dramatic cost reductions mean wind and solar can now compete on price with conventional sources of energy in many parts of the world, including the UK. This turns the spotlight onto the so-called “whole system costs” of integrating renewables into the electricity system, which include backing up intermittent generation and strengthening grids.
Co-operatives have been described as freshwater fish in a saltwater environment. In the 1930s, the co-operative sector in many countries was very powerful but it was destroyed by fascist and communist regimes. What was it that the authoritarians found so threatening in co-operation?
True, economic growth does provide some short-term benefits and gains, and recessions are legitimately painful and destructive. But economic growth is nevertheless the greatest threat to humanity today, and those most devoted to economic growth will, as its consistent performance begins to wane in the future, perhaps be the greatest political threat to ordinary people of the world.
This is where buy local is different from Buy America. Buying locally-produced products that are sold in locally-owned stores is a key strategy for building local wealth. Every dollar spent locally is a dollar of wealth retained in the community. The alternative is for that wealth to leak into other communities while making the local community poorer. This is the community expression of the saying, “A penny saved is a penny earned.”
Researchers at the John A Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard University in the US say in an article published in ACS Energy Letters that they have now developed a long-lasting flow battery capable of storing renewable power that could operate for up to 10 years, with minimum maintenance required.
As a solution to the present situation, a growing number of people in the world are proposing “communalism”: the usurpation of capitalism, the state, and social hierarchy by the way of town, village, and neighborhood assemblies and federations. Communalism is a living idea, one that builds upon a rich legacy of political history and social movements.
It is likely that most thoughtful people today experience future possibilities as fearful. All the objective signs – political, social, ecological – appear largely negative. It seems clear that a crash or major rupture of our economic model is coming as well as an abrupt shift in our climate stability. Efforts at reform have proven to be too weak and inadequate. Journey to Earthland positions itself right in the midst of this foreboding.
Numerous restaurants across the country have joined a Sanctuary Restaurants Movement to offer safe and tolerant spaces to restaurant workers, employers, and consumers that face hate and harassment in the restaurant industry.
The near-failure on Sunday evening of the auxiliary spillway at Oroville Dam and the ongoing emergency operations to contain flood waters in California’s second-largest reservoir and shore up its eroding outlet are a tale of caution for the nation’s aging dam fleet.
Nor is there any need for politics to be something inflicted on us, at great cost to our souls, by tyrannical, abstract systems. Instead it should and could be something we recapture from its lofty conceptual realms, disarm, bring down to earth, and revive — in the process remaking ourselves and our world.
Hilary Jennings of Transition Town Tooting and Transition Network recently saw Ella Hickson’s explosive play Oil and was fascinated by it. It follows the lives of one woman and her daughter in an epic, hurtling collision of empire, history and family, and drills deep into the world’s relationship with this finite resource.
Ashland has an abundance of “social inventors” — people who see a need in the community and are able to rally others to take part in it, all to make life better, more fun and more hopeful. In a new book called “Better Ways to Live,” Ashlander Craig K. Comstock profiles a raft of social inventions, many which influence the Ashland community…
