Tom Murphy

Flex-Fuel Humans

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If you’re one of those humans who actually eats food, like I am, then a non-negligible part of your energy allocation goes into food production. As an approximate rule-of-thumb, each kilocalorie ingested by Americans consumes 10 kilocalories of fossil fuel energy to plant, fertilize, harvest, transport, and prepare….But much like household energy, we control what we stick in our mouths, and can make energy-conscious choices that result in substantial reductions of energy consumption. I now call myself a flexitarian, a term acknowledging that my body is a flex-fuel vehicle, but also that I need not be rigid about my food choices in order to still make a substantial impact on the energy front.

A tide of oil and greed

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Antonia Juhasz’s book Black Tide is a devastating indictment of the oil and drilling industry that was responsible. But she doesn’t stop there. She’s also included damning evidence of the role of U.S. politicians, government agencies and regulations that all failed to protect the people and environment of the Gulf.

It pays to stay home

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One of the unsung advantages of being in love with a garden or a farm is that the lover doesn’t mind staying home and by doing so, saving gobs of money. In fact most of us land lovers much prefer to stay home… With 30 acres, I never want for a changing world to travel through, a journey not far in miles but almost infinite in terms of material wonders and splendors deep down into the earth and high up into the ever-changing beauty of the sky.

To young people, justice is a key ingredient in good food

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Our generation is coming of age with the starkest income disparity since the 1920’s, with climate change already making major impacts on our environment, with student debt creeping towards $1 trillion, with progress on race and gender issues stagnating. We did not create this mess. We are pissed, so we are connecting the dots and we are skilling-up.

Redefining wealth

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In 1984 Fritjof Capra had the bright idea of founding the Elmwood Institute, an ecological think thank. In 1992 I undertook to morph our newsletter into a quarterly journal. In the inaugural issue, on “redefining wealth,” the editor’s letter used the metaphor of the cornucopia to discuss emerging challenges. What is so startling, 20 years later, is that while some of the challenges are now more familiar, they remain far from being met. Perhaps part of resilience is having different goals.

An update on global net oil exports: Is it midnight on the Titanic?

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While slowly increasing US crude oil production is very important, the dominant trend we are seeing is that developed oil importing countries like the US are being gradually priced out of the global market for exported oil, as global oil prices doubled from 2005 to 2011, and as developing countries like the Chindia region consumed an increasing share of a declining volume of global net exports of oil. (webinar on Thursday April 26)

‘In Transition 2.0′ reviewed by Charlotte Du Cann for STIR magazine

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It’s a small story. These are all small stories. You might not know they are happening or take much notice of them. But if you were curious, you would discover how that lettuce came to be growing in such an unlikely neighbourhood; why everyone in the carnival was wearing clothes made of rubbish; why the elders of the village were teaching the young people to plough; why Joel Prittie, ex double-glazing salesman, knocked on 1100 doors in the rain in Manchester. If you pulled these stories together, you would notice they all had a common thread. That’s the moment you realise it’s a big story. The story in fact. The story of how people are coming together in the face of difficulties and making another kind of future.

That’s the story of Transition 2.0.

Party politics

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Political parties are dizzyingly diverse, ranging from the little disciplined American electoral machines to the totalitarian para-bureaucracies of the so-called socialist states. They all emerged during the nineteenth century from parliamentary factions, revolutionary more-or-less secret societies and even lobbies.

The flow of cheap and abundant energy that flooded our society after the Industrial Revolution triggered a fantastic wave of growth and complexification in all organizations, and political parties were no exception. As more resources were available in the society at large, political parties could divert more and more of them to feed their internal bureaucracy.

Three cheeks for democracy

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If the Netherlands is in economic trouble it is clear that no European country is safe. This, I assume, is why we are finally hearing some serious debate about whether cutting, cutting and cutting again is the best way to deal with an economic crisis. Even those in the financial markets, who lobbied for the deficit rules and bid up the cost of government borrowing in one European country after another, are beginning to feel nervous. After all, stable legal and political systems are essential to their profit-making activities. But whether their short-termist destabilisation of whole national economies and a whole currency area can be reversed once they see its risks to their own positions remains to be seen.

Money and wealth: How to heal the disconnect

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The truth is that the English still believe that their bank manager is at his desk, drinking sherry, umming and aahing about their overdrafts. In fact, he has long since been replaced by risk software. That’s our national failing. It is endearing in a way, but it’s also dreadfully frustrating. Because it means we’re stuck in the oldest fantasy about money that there is. We imagine that it’s real. And in some ways, this is the source of the crisis in the euro-zone as well. In England, our politicians never argue about this issue — who creates money, where it comes from, what it means — for the reasons I say. But in America, it’s always been the heart of political debate.