Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Karen Brown Just fifteen minutes from my front door, mills used to transform locally-grown fiber into beautiful fabric. All that capability is gone now, off-shored in the 1990s. As someone who is interested in local sourcing, I had to ask the question, “Is it still possible to dress locally?” So I decided to see for myself what it would take to make a garment – a little black coat – from resources right in my own area.
In this post, I provide…charts showing long-term changes in energy supply, together with some observations regarding implications. One such implication is how economists can be misled by past patterns, if they do not realize that past patterns reflect very different energy growth patterns than we will likely see in the future.
Public sector banking is a concept that is relatively unknown in the United States. Only one state—North Dakota—owns its own bank. North Dakota is also the only state to escape the credit crisis of 2008, sporting a budget surplus every year since; but skeptics write this off to coincidence or other factors. The common perception is that government bureaucrats are bad businessmen. To determine whether government-owned banks are assets or liabilities, then, we need to look farther afield.
On Ash Wednesday, churches in San Francisco announced they were removing $10 million from Wells Fargo and called on the bank, as per the advocacy group Faith in Public Life, “to put an immediate freeze on its foreclosures and repent for their misconduct.” The March 9 New York Times reported that, “The Rev. Richard Smith of St. John the Evangelist, an Episcopal church in San Francisco, likened the divestment campaign and public protests to early Christianity’s ritual of ‘reconciliation of the penitents’.” Far from taking place in the private sanctity of the confessional, that rite occurred in public, with the penitent overseen by a priest and required to present himself before a bishop.
-Older nuclear plants pose safety challenge: IAEA
-Protesters link arms around the world to decry nuclear power
The Fukushima Nuclear Disaster – One Year Later – Radio Ecoshock
-No Primrose Path
-Australia passes controversial nuclear waste bill
-IAEA: “significant” nuclear growth despite Fukushima
Finally, a plausible explanation for the Obama-Cameron political orgy — ‘love-in’ doesn’t quite do it — in Washington this week. For Cameron the benefit of this floorshow was obvious — like Blair with Bush, revelling in the reflected glory of US power — but Obama’s motive remained a mystery. What could possibly justify gifting all that folderol and face time with the world’s most powerful man? Yesterday we got the answer: international cover for a politically motivated release from strategic petroleum reserves, that’s what.
A fascinating post over at Leaving Babylon by Vera Bradova called Tedium and black magic: the trouble with Energy Descent Action Plans (EDAPs) raises some interesting questions about Transition and planning, and EDAPs in particular. The version published at EnergyBulletin.net pulls out some of the most salient comments. It offers a very good opportunity to revisit the role of the EDAP in Transition, and how that has changed over time, an issue I am very grateful to her for raising.
America’s movement toward empire was anything but straightforward, not least because of the deep divisions among regional settlement patterns sketched out in last week’s post. Those divisions drove an equally profound split between competing modes of expansion — a split that finally exploded into America’s most costly war. Ironically, the mode that won proceeded to make itself obsolete by running headlong into the limits to growth, and thus set the stage for the push for overseas empire that dominated American history in the 20th century.
One thing is certain: traditional liberalism, dependent on expensive federal policies and strong labor unions, is moribund. The government no longer has much capacity to use progressive taxation to achieve the goal of equity or to regulate corporations effectively. Congressional deadlocks on such matters are the rule, not the exception. At the same time, ongoing economic stagnation or mild upturns followed by further decay, and “real” unemployment rates in the 15 percent to 16 percent range appear more likely than a return to booming economic times.
This was an important discussion back when I wrote it in 2007, and somehow, I’ve never re-run it (although it does appear in Aaron and my book _A Nation of Farmers_). It is definitely time to talk more about this model, and I’m hoping to enlist many of you in doing an evaluation of the real productivity of our home gardens and farms – using this as a model. So time to run it again, as a starting point for seeing how much progress the local food movement has really made in the years since it began!
The Washington Post is beginning to understand the realities underlying America’s gasoline price problem and look behind the political bombast far enough to develop a somewhat realistic appraisal of our energy situation.
However, the newspaper has to take one more giant step before it comes completely in touch with reality. One searches in vain for any mention in a recent article that conventional petroleum production, from which our high-priced gasoline is made, has been stagnant for the last six years – i.e. global oil production is peaking. Once this threshold is crossed we (the press, the administration, political candidates, and the body politic) can begin a meaningful discussion of our options for the future.
-Are We Running Out of Water?
-From Texas to India to the Horn of Africa, Concern about Weather, Water, and Crops
-China irrigation system responsible for rising emissions, research shows
-Climate, food pressures require rethink on water: U.N
