Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Gar Alperovitz Just beneath the surface of traditional media attention, something vital has been gathering force and is about to explode into public consciousness. The “New Economy Movement” is a far-ranging coming together of organizations, projects, activists, theorists and ordinary citizens committed to rebuilding the American political-economic system from the ground up.
I propose to you today a bold paradigm shift in our economy — away from the futureless economics, away from the casino economics, and away from the cheater economics that run the global economy. We need an economics for the earth, its people, and all the life on this planet.
The Grind affects all of us, whether the next storm hits you, your neighbor or far away. It affects us in complicated ways as patterns of relocation and refugeeism change, in our insurance premiums and our neighborhoods as houses sell or don’t sell, in our families as we suddenly take in relatives escaping the latest disaster. Right now we can mostly absorb the costs, with only the expected pain – the little things that don’t get fixed, the people who can’t quite make it out of the quagmire. As we go along into a warming world with energy supply constraints, however, the grind keeps coming back, and its drag upon us gets heavier.
Energy journalist and author Maggie Koerth-Baker interviewed about her book, Before the Lights Go Out at Minnesota Public Radio’s “Bright Ideas”. A good intro into why there are no ‘silver bullets’.
A weekly review including:
-Oil and the Global Economy
-The EU Crisis
-Iran
-Quote of the Week
-Briefs
Education has a remarkably inelastic demand curve and even in a contracting economy people will spend their last dollars to educate their children. Along with healthcare, high-tech weaponry, food, water, drugs, and internal ‘security’, Americans will pay almost any price for education, which is why the Right has furiously worked to privatize it and as well the rest of these. In a time when economies around the globe are stagnating (due to flattening or declining net emergies) they are the last growth industries of the capitalist growth economy.
– The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars
– How to Change the World. The School of Life.
– How to Grow Perennial Vegetable
– 2052: a global forecast for the next forty years
– Visualising Climate Change
– People and Permaculture
– Treasure Islands: tax havens and the men who stole the world
– Local Dollars, Local Sense
– The Fruit Tree Handbook
– The House of Silk
If the world can be seen in a grain of sand, watch out. As Wisconsinites are learning, there’s money (and misery) in sand — and if you’ve got the right kind, an oil company may soon be at your doorstep.
It was the enlightenment, certainly, through which a whole host of new political views about public voice and the independent integrity of the individual emerged into the mainstream, even if took another 150 years, or even 200, to work themselves out. And at the same time it was the beginning of the age of extraction, when humankind started to use the stored resources of the planet at scale for their profit and endeavour. Both of these ideas are still the dominant frames of our public discourse, certainly in the richer world, and shape (almost completely) competing arguments about sustainability.
CaSiO3 + CO2 -> CaCO3 + SiO2
The silicate weathering reaction is what keeps “Gaia” alive – better said, it is Gaia. And don’t make the mistake of thinking that Gaia is a goddess and that, somehow, she cares about us. No, it is more correct to say that Gaia doesn’t give a damn about us – which is what you’d expect from a chemical reaction, after all. It is us who have been tampering with this chemical reaction and it will be us who will have to face the consequences.
In the end, we can’t hope to force the planet to do what we want it to do. So, we must learn to live with the flow of the Earth’s cycles. For that, we must know a little chemistry. But more than chemistry, we must learn our limits, otherwise we won’t survive for long.
It feels as though we now have the first informed American report on the oil issue. One is struck by how well they describe the problem that ASPO and my research group have attempted to raise awareness of during the last 10 years. That this group of Americans perceive reality in a different way than is common in the USA is presumably because they are diplomats who have been outside the USA’s borders and have studied their nation from a different perspective.
One fact ought to tell you all you need to know about the risks faced by homeowners signing leases for natural gas drilling on their property: Wells Fargo & Company, both the largest home mortgage lender in the United States and a major lender to the country’s second largest producer of natural gas, Chesapeake Energy Corp., refuses to make home loans for properties encumbered with natural gas drilling leases.
