Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Adrian Ayres Fisher "Speaking truth to power" was originally a Quaker phrase. Many of us act in ways that might seem to go against common sense, against apparent rationality. This has to do with a belief in what has been called deep ethics, a belief, as I have written about briefly here, that what one does matters even if it might seem insignificant or hopeless at the time.
Okay, I’m going to give you the shortest course ever in energy abundance: Energy abundance depends entirely on the RATE of energy flow.
A picture is worth a thousand words. This graph compares the price history of solar energy to conventional energy sources. The comparison is striking. This is what a disruptive technology looks like. While conventional energy prices remained pretty flat in inflation adjusted terms, the cost of solar is dropping,fast, and is likely to continue doing so as technology and manufacturing processes improve.
It’s been said that a man’s religion is the thing he can’t bear to have questioned. If there’s any truth in that old saying, the idea that faith in progress is a religion has a great deal going for it.
There have been a lot of talks about banks lately in France, both because of the Cypriot debacle and because the minister in charge of the French IRS has been caught red-handed hiding a substantial amount of money in some Swiss bank.
Arctic sea-ice expert and editor of the upcoming IPCC report Prof. Peter Wadhams, talks to Tom O’Brien about the imminent collapse of the Arctic summer ice and catastrophic climate change.
Some ideas find their basis in fact, while others fall under the category of faith. But, then there is a vast sea of ideas parading as facts, when really, these ‘facts’ are nothing but ideology based on ideas that are empirically false or at least suspect.
I first read this remarkable passage by Milton Friedman a few years ago in Steve Keen’s book Debunking Economics. Keen is one of only twelve economists to have predicted the recent great recession so he is entirely credible. Still I’m a skeptical person and with due respect to Friedman I had to read the original paper.
When Cary Neeper first published excerpts of her novel The Webs of Varok on Resilience.org, one commenter dismissed the work as being “merely a polemic pretending to be a novel.” Only the first charge is correct. The book clearly is an impassioned polemic against the extravagance and destructiveness of industrial society, but it’s hardly “pretending to be a novel.” Rather, it is an involving, well-plotted story that does justice to both the hard science underpinning its interplanetary settings and the long evolutionary perspectives typical of the old scientific romances (those of H.G. Wells, Jules Verne and Arthur C. Clarke). Further, Neeper is in good company in her use of polemic, as Resilience editor Bart Anderson pointed out in his reply to the first commenter’s post. Anderson observed that George Orwell, Sinclair Lewis, Aldous Huxley and many other great authors have used polemic to poignant and lasting effect.
Death. More death here at the Dead End Alley Farm. This time it was our bees. The bees that up until a few weeks ago I thought were going to come through the winter successfully. But as life has shown us recently, nothing is for certain when walking down the path of homesteading.
To suggest that faith in progress has become the most widely accepted civil religion of the modern industrial world, as I’ve done in these essays, is to say something at once subtler and more specific than a first glance might suggest. It’s important to keep in mind, as I pointed out in last week’s post, that “religion” isn’t a specific thing with a specific definition; rather, it’s a label for a category constructed by human minds—an abstraction, in other words, meant to help sort out the blooming, buzzing confusion of the cosmos into patterns that make some kind of sense to us.
With all the talk about new oil discoveries around the world and new techniques for extracting oil, it would be easy to miss the main action in the oil supply story: Aging giant fields produce more than half of global oil supply and are already declining as group.
