Tuhi-Ao Bailey

How we can bring the world out of the mess in which it finds itself

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I have tried to write this article many times in the past three to four years. I have changed dramatically in that time, from a full-on, full-time city activist to a rural — well, I don’t know what to call myself now but whatever I am becoming, I feel way more grounded and as if I’m making a real difference, finally, without running away to the hills. In considering the mess of the world, I find it easiest to write about my personal journey, not because I want to talk about myself but because I find the personal easier for people to relate to and because it gives context to my points of view.

Commentary: The world is finite, isn’t it?

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Yesterday I gave a presentation to a group of distinguished business leaders. In my presentation, I tried to show that the global rate of production of petroleum and the associated lease condensate is at an all-time high or a "peak" that at a greatly expanded scale looks like a "plateau." I used my published, peer-reviewed extensions of King Hubbert’s approach to support my arguments.

I received a significant push back from several members of the audience.

 

Context is everything

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Quite a number of readers suggested I respond to James McWilliams’ piece in the New York Times “The Myth of Sustainable Meat.” McWilliams has garnered quite a bit of attention by critiquing the idea of local food, and in some cases, some of his analyses, as far as they go, are right. For example, McWilliams is quite right that if everyone in America eats as much beef as they always have, but converts to grassfed beef his figures are roughly correct.

In this case, the call for sustainable egg production I made last week (in response to a rather better New York Times article, in fact) would seem to be insanely misguided. After all, as several readers pointed out, eggs would be more expensive, and we probably couldn’t eat as many of them. Woah – so that means eggs are totally unsustainable, right?

Cooperative culture – energy characteristics

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In his book Together, Richard Sennett traces the nature and evolution of cooperation in society. He examines the reasons for the lack of cooperation in current society, and how we can reclaim it. As I read, wearing my spectacles made with energy lenses, I saw the give and take of mutualism throughout history as a function in part of societies with surplus energies (high gain) and less surplus energies (low gain).

The dumbest guys in the room: Is Cheniere Energy a contrarian indicator for natural gas?

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Some people seem to have a knack for hopping aboard a trend just before it ends. Cheniere Energy Inc., owner of the largest liquefied natural gas (LNG) import facility in the United States, appears to be a case in point. In the world of finance, Cheniere would be what is called a contrary indicator, one that suggests that a trend is about to reverse.

Let’s hear it for higher gasoline prices

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Gas prices are on the rise again, which means the “man on the street” will complain to local news reporters about greedy oil companies and foreign cartels, and energy-illiterate pundits and politicians will cry for domestic drilling with wild abandon. But is gasoline, now approaching $4 per gallon in Ohio, really expensive?

Tikkun olam: mending the world

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Obviously the world is so broken, in so many ways, that there is endless patching, mending, fixing to do and no one person can make much progress. Yet, as I have reflected over the years I’ve noticed that there is room to be human and an acceptance of the imperfect in this way of thinking and acting. There is, as in the Japanese concept of shibumi, a virtue in simplicity, modesty, and everydayness.

Who stole fun?

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The increasingly self-conscious pursuit of fun has reshaped the ethos of what life was all about. As early as 1958, the psychoanalyst and writer Martha Wolfenstein suggested that society was seeing the rise of a new “fun morality”: an explicit social imperative to have fun all the time, in all areas of life. However, far from being positive, Wolfenstein saw this fun morality as problematic. It created a source of anxiety in which one felt “ashamed” and “secretly worried” that one wasn’t having as much fun as one ought to be.