Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Marq de Villiers Bargain-hunting has become a cultural obsession (my father in law, bless him, used to drive a good way across town so he could buy day-old bread that a flyer had promised was a nickel a loaf cheaper; my neighbor trolls the Internet for wine a dollar cheaper, or a lawnmower he can get for a hundreds buck off — whether or not he needs another lawnmower). Thrift hasn’t disappeared; it just mutated into the endless search for cheaper stuff.
In thousands of ways, UN policy helps shape how we respond to emerging crises, from basic poverty to world political events, from food to climate change and population. What is emerging, however, is that UN analyses are increasingly diverging from reality – as they attempt to describe our future, they have failed to adequately (or at all) take into account that most basic of all considerations, material limits on energy resources.
I am not sure whether the coincidence of the next critical phase in the global credit crisis with the celebration of the Queen’s jubilee is ironic or tragic, but it certainly gives me an opportunity to explore the real roots of the concept of jubilee, a concept whose real meaning could not be further from the spectacle of disempowered British citizens, burdened with the debts of their unaccountable elite, paying homage to the figurehead of the system of unequal power and property relations that oppresses them.
This is a written version of the talk that I gave at the “ASPO-2012” meeting in Vienna, on May 31 2012. It describes my experience with waste management as a way of closing the industrial cycle and attaining long term sustainability. Here, I introduce the concept of “urban gleaning”, a high efficiency way of dealing with waste.
The Age of Limits conference held at the end of May offered some new insights on how religion, as an organized institution, could play a key role in helping mitigate the collapse that the conferences speakers think has already hit many parts of the world, including much of the U.S.
Though at this event, neither religion nor collapse were what they used to be.
A weekly roundup of peak oil news, including:
-Oil and the global economy
-The EU crisis
-Falling prices
-Quote of the week
-Briefs
-The Planet Wreckers
-Top US companies shelling out to block action on climate change
-North Carolina Wishes Away Climate Change
-A cold climate in the arts world
One mile north of the Mason-Dixon line in Southeastern Pennsylvania, nearly 200 people from the US and beyond, gathered this weekend on the land of Four Quarters Inter-Faith Sanctuary to consider Peak Oil, climate change, and economic meltdown—and the collapse of industrial civilization.
You could say this is the worst and the best of times to be publishing in print. Worst because we are in a recession, at the tail end of an industrialised civilisation, where “growth at all cost” has began to play out its consequences. Best because there is a whole new narrative out there, the happening story of Transition you might not see covered by mainstream media. That’s the story we’re aiming to tell.
Mr Per Bolund of the Swedish Green Party has addressed a question on Peak Oil to the Finance Minister Anders Borg.
In the end it was not Finance Minister Borg who answered the question rather than the Energy Minister Anna-Karin Hatt (and you can now listen to the parliamentary debate on the question in Swedish).
Modern agriculture and modern medicine go hand in hand. And, perhaps one of the best-known ways they interact is the use of antibiotics. Now the same model is being applied to crops.
-Storytelling our energy future – Chris Nelder
-The Peak Oil Crisis: The Edisonian Approach – Tom Whipple
-Efficiency and Conservation Not Enough to Achieve Energy Security
