Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Roger Blanchard One way to psychologically deal with global warming is denial. For those who profit from fossil fuel production or those who want unlimited use of fossil fuels, this is the primary way in which the issue is addressed.
Does charitable giving serve to give us an easy way out of having to ask why certain people and countries need our charity while others do not?
With Christmas past, household consumption reached its yearly peak in many countries. Whilst this celebration still brings up a homely picture of tranquility, the truth is that Christmas is characterized more by frenzied shopping, stress and overspending than by peace and quality time.
This is where the notion of the infinite or the limitless scale of the Americas comes in, a notion that appears repeatedly throughout Jefferson’s work…when in doubt, expand and grow.
Wonders-yet-to-come seem to dominate U.S. energy policy. There is talk of changing laws to allow the exporting of oil and natural gas. There is talk of American energy independence. There is talk of an American energy renaissance and the ruination of OPEC. It is all very breathless and essentially baseless.
I’ve noticed, over the past few years, a growing lack of enthusiasm in the formerly raucous festivities that once marked the end of one year and the beginning of another.
Mark Twain once said, "It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so." And, there are many, many things that the public and policymakers know for sure about energy that just ain’t so.
Regular readers of this blog will be aware that I’ve spent most of the last year discussing the place of religion in the troubled future ahead of us. This holiday season, in which millions of Americans have just engaged in an all-out orgy of conspicuous consumption and mindless waste to celebrate the birth of a poor carpenter’s son in a stable in Bethlehem, also has me thinking about religious matters, and it occurs to me that there’s an issue along these lines that my blog posts haven’t yet explored.
Recent reforms would open oil exploration and development in Mexico to major oil companies for the first time in decades. But it’s instructive to look at what actually happened in Brazil since the time its potential as a major new oil producer was touted several years ago under similar circumstances.
The attempt to conquer nature—in less metaphorical terms, to render the nonhuman world completely transparent to the human intellect and just as completely subject to the human will—was industrial civilization’s defining project.
There has always seemed to be something deeply wrong with fracking for oil and natural gas.
The results of the dialogue I conducted with my garden in 2013 are in. Did my hypotheses bear out? What questions did the garden ask and answer that I didn’t anticipate? You’ll have to read the post to find out!
