Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Big Gav Citibank has released an interesting report on "peak coal" in China – referring to peak demand rather than any supply driven peak of production (something I view as quite far off) -The Unimaginable: Peak Coal in China. The limit to coal use appears to be how much pollution the Chinese population is willing to tolerate – a reminder that there is more than one "limit to growth".
As I walked up the hill this morning to work a few hours in my family’s half-acre urban farm, my head was sore from a stampede of news: Syria in the crosshairs of the White House; economies swaying precariously like ten-foot stacks of Jenga blocks ready to fall; the open wound at Fukushima; the deepening trauma of unemployment around the country, and so on. When I arrived, I tried to discuss the latest with the green beans and winter squashes. They just politely changed the subject.
Last week’s post here on The Archdruid Report was, as some of my readers grasped, more than an attempt to imagine the far future without reference to the contemporary folk mythologies of progress and apocalypse—though it was also that, of course.
…And you’ll know they’re the right prayers when it doesn’t feel like praying is a separate thing from living. …When you don’t feel those disconnects anymore between what you pray and what you do; between the land, your community, your family, and yourself.
In this article I apply the idea of energy return on energy invested to food production in the United States, and discuss the relevance of energy efficiency to the local food movement.
Earlier this week, I was trying to think of ways to talk about the gap between notions about the future we’ve all absorbed from the last three hundred years of fossil-fueled progress, on the one hand, and the ways of thinking about what’s ahead that might actually help us make sense of our predicament and the postpetroleum, post-progress world ahead, on the other.
A detailed projection of phosphorus production by two Australian researchers indicates that world phosphate rock production will most likely peak in 2027. Phosphorus is a finite resource and cannot be substituted for agricultural uses. Without the use of phosophrus in fertilisers it would be difficult to provide sufficient food for an expanding world population.
Global gas flaring–the burning of natural gas associated with oil extraction processes–remains stubbornly high. We examine the determinants of gas flaring in three prominent cases: Russia and Nigeria as the two largest emitters of flare gas, and the United States as a rapidly expanding newcomer to the club.
I believe that the Syrian regime’s use of chemical weapons is merely a pretext for American intervention. One always suspects that oil is the real issue when it comes to the Middle East. So, let’s see if that’s the case here.
After centuries of overconfident pronouncements about "Man’s conquest of Nature," it’s past time to start grappling with an unwelcome reality: what do we do when Nature wins?
Permaculture is introduced in Hangzhou, China providing an alternative to Chinese Industrial Agriculture.
