Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
John Michael Greer The last six months or so have seen an unprecedented flood of official pronouncements and media stories attempting, with dubious results, to brush aside the reality of peak oil. Those of my readers who know their way around old science fiction serials know what this means: something is about to explode.
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Jobs, or rather the lack of, have been a major issue during the last French elections. This is hardly surprising as mass unemployment has been a fact of life in France for a whole generation. Unemployment rates have begun to climb during the late seventies and have hoovered between eight and ten percent since then. Of course the real figure is probably higher.
Carpe Diem, Reuters, FTalphaville, and WhaleOil are among those calling attention to a new paper by Leonardo Maugeri, senior manager for the Italian oil company Eni, and Senior Fellow at Harvard University. Here I take a look at some of the details of Maugeri’s analysis.
Some parts of the world pretty much sailed through the 2008-2009 recession, while other parts of the world had huge problems. The part that sailed through the recession is what I call the “Growing Part of the World”. I thought it would be interesting to see how the countries in the “Growing Part of the World” have behaved over the long term with respect to a number of variables (energy, GDP, and population). I compare these countries to two other groups of countries which did not fare as well during the 2008-2009 recession: European Union 27, United States and Japan, and the Former Soviet Union (FSU).
In development that feels strangely like kismet, an encampment of dispossessed young people who wish to opt out of the corporate system and reclaim a basic freedom of working the land, have made their way to Runnymede, a hallowed site in the history of the commons.
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Steve Levine has a blog post discussing the idea that the “unfolding new age of fossil fuel abundance” will have profound effects on various things, including OPEC…The key factor behind this kind of thinking is the rapid rise of production of oil from tight rocks like the Bakken in North Dakota and the Eagle Ford in Texas. I haven’t taken a strong position on what the limits of production are from these sources – it just isn’t clear to me yet from the data that I have available. But we could certainly place some limits on how much geopolitical impact this could have on OPEC.
So here’s the question: Is solar just a cute diversion, like having a llama carry your backpack, or does it have the oomph to make a serious dent in the energy appetite of a populous country? Is it a toy or a tool? A llama or a mule?
I think we inevitably underestimate the bond between biological complexity and cultural complexity…It may seem far-fetched to compare social and agricultural change in Iowa with linguistic and biological correlation in some of Earth’s biodiversity hotspots. But the underlying premise is the same. Biological diversity and cultural diversity go hand in hand.
The proverbial elephant in the room (and perhaps the ACA’s fatal flaw) from my in-the-trenches standpoint is the sustainability question, How on earth is this health care system going to survive? The question has two components: First, the billions of dollars required to implement and sustain the ACA. Second, and most important, I’m talking about the viability of a system that is inextricably dependent on a ready supply of resources that are being consumed faster than they can be replaced.
