Staff

The myth of smart growth (report extract)

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“Smart growth” is an urban growth management strategy that applies planning and design principles which are intended to mitigate the impacts of continued growth. If properly applied, these principles represent a positive contribution to new urban development. However, smart growth is part of the “culture of growth” that perpetuates the “endless growth model.” The rhetoric of smart growth is that population levels and growth rates are not the problem; it’s merely a matter of how we grow.

Hands That Are Invisible

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Around the same year that the American colonies declared their independence, Adam Smith launched one of the most enduring and influential metaphors in all of social thought. That metaphor is the “invisible hand,” the deft limb that is said to convert individual greed or self-interest into public good. During a visit to Edinburgh I made a little pilgrimage to Adam Smith’s grave in the Canongate Kirkyard.

“This Is Just the Beginning”: Forest Fires, Deadly Storms, Record Heat Reveal a Changed Climate

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The past two weeks have witnessed the worst forest fires in Colorado history, a deadly Mid-Atlantic storm that left 23 dead and four million without power, and a record shattering heat wave across the East Coast and Midwest that has not seen since the Dust Bowl. More than 2,000 heat records have been broken in the past week. As the words “extreme weather” flash across TV screens, where are the other two words: “global warming”? We speak to The Guardian’s U.S. environment correspondent Suzanne Goldenberg and Jeff Masters, director of meteorology at the Weather Underground website.

Say it isn’t so: Review of J. H. Kunstler’s “Too Much Magic”

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James Howard Kunstler describes himself as an “all-purpose writer,” and boy can he write. His latest book “Too Much Magic: Wishful Thinking, Technology, and the Fate of the Nation,” has taken otherwise ‘hard to write clearly about’ subjects such as financial instruments, what’s happening to our environment and shale oil, and made them interesting and useful to the reader, without talking down to, or boring us.

Shale oil and tight oil

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Since 2005, the "total oil supply" for the United States as reported by the Energy Information Administration increased by 2.2 million barrels per day. Of this, 1.3 mb/d, or 60%, has come from natural gas liquids and biofuels, which really shouldn’t be added to conventional crude production for purposes of calculating the available supply. Of the 800,000 b/d increase in actual field production of crude oil, almost all of the gain has come from shale and other tight formations that horizontal fracturing methods have only recently opened up. Here I offer some thoughts on how these new production methods change the overall outlook for U.S. oil production.