Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Michael Klare National security expert Michael Klare believes the struggle for the world’s resources will be one of the defining political and environmental realities of the 21st century. In an interview with Yale Environment 360, he discusses the threat this scramble poses to the natural world and what can be done to sustainably meet the resource challenge.
The California farming community is facing a demographic crisis. The average age of a California farmer is 58, and nearly 20 percent of them are 70 or older. As these farmers approach retirement, California needs to train new ones if we are to continue to feed our country and keep a healthy rural economy in the decades ahead. And with farm internships in California subject to strict labor laws, opportunities to get a hands-on farming education have become even fewer.
A video diary from the The International Conference on Degrowth in the Americas, Montreal, including video interviews with Juliet Shor, Mary Evelyn Tucker, and Gail Tverberg.
Josh Farley explains the concepts and implications of money as debt, GDP as a measure of the economy, and economic degrowth in this video interview recorded at the Montreal Degrowth Conference.
The world is clearly reaching many limits. What limits are the human and natural systems reaching now?
The local Transition group’s brand new community garden needed raised beds. So we tried a couple different ways to get them.
G8 leaders meeting last weekend in Camp David will have been cheered by the recent slide in oil prices – albeit that the weakening in price is largely a consequence of the increasingly dire economic news. Nevertheless the group issued a statement to the effect that should the price start heading back in the other direction they will be calling on the IEA to take action…
You’ve heard of CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook’s 900 users exchanging gossip and other personal pleasantries or worries through a medium that inflates narcissism. You’ve probably not heard of Ben Rose of the New York City Materials Exchange Development Program (NYC MEDP) or the equivalent organizations in your communities providing services to thousands of charitable non-profit groups which promote the donating and reusing of materials to avoid incineration, landfilling and recycling.
Whenever the U.S. supply of imported oil is threatened with interruption (or if the U.S. economy should recover much), the global marketplace bids up the oil price, and the politically sensitive price of gasoline will rise in step and depress consumer spending. Whenever the world oil price is high enough, it can cause an economic crisis. In this case global demand may contract sharply, as it did in 2009. The price can never rise for long above what the global oil market can bear.
Contrary to the views of some ill-informed journalists and politicians, there are many places where the international momentum is swinging rapidly towards — not away from — a swift transition to a post-carbon economy.
Oil pundits and politicians are pushing the idea of United States energy independence due largely to the current boom in hydraulic fracturing. But behind the rhetoric, is there any truth to these claims?
Between January 2002 and August 2008, the nominal oil price rose from $19.7 to $133.4 a barrel. This led to a large increase in oil revenues for oil exporters and a deterioration of the current account for oil importers. Between 2002 and 2006, net capital outflows from oil exporters grew by 348%, becoming the largest global source of net capital outflows in 2006 (McKinsey 2007).
Capital outflows from oil exporters therefore played an important role in the global liquidity glut during the build-up to the US subprime crisis.
