United States – May 21
How to follow the fossil fuel money on Capitol Hill
US energy use a national security threat: study
Kunstler: Bad collateral
America goes on furlough
Staff
Solutions & sustainability – May 21
Simplicity: Peter Lawrence and Jim Merkel
Rethinking land use at Dartington: Rob Hopkins presentation
PBS documentary points to Portland transportation planning
Live Local (in Australia)
Deep thought – May 21
Paul Hawken commencement address: Healing or stealing? – “You are brilliant, and the earth is hiring…”
Carolyn Baker: Simplicity on the outside, complexity on the inside
Message in what we buy, but nobody’s listening
Energy solutions & glitches – May 21
The gospel of green (Hermannn Scheer)
Jeremy Revkin: ‘Distributed power’ to save Earth
Love affair with gadgets squeezing power supply
‘Alarming’ use of energy, materials in newer manufacturing processes
How to save energy: plug in a new gadget
Peak oil notes – May 21
A weekly round-up including:
– Prices and production
– Brazil turns to China
– Obama administration accord pushes MPG
Mr. Market gets it wrong again
Let me take a moment to explain why oil prices reflecting actual market conditions might be important to us. Regardless of whether we are in the Peak Oil Era — we probably are — in 2009, we would like to know at all times what the relative abundance of the Elixir of Life (with respect to demand for it) for Industrial Civilizations is.
Humanity at a crossroads
The evidence is gaining increasing clarity: We’ve reached a crossroads unlike any other in human history. One path leads to despair for Homo industrialis. The other leads to extinction, for Homo sapiens and the millions of species we are taking with us into the abyss. I’ll take door number one.
ODAC Newsletter – May 22
A weekly review from a UK perspective.
Economics – May 21
Poor? Pay up
Ask Jeff Rubin
David Rosenberg: ‘I think people are still in denial’
The myth of efficiency
What makes efficiency? Is it clever management? The “productivity” of human resources? Economies of scale? Centralization? Better information and computer systems? The competition of markets? Business people give credit to these innovations, and all of these changes may contribute incrementally to the cheapness of our food, but these are just icing on the cake. The real underpinning of what we think of as efficiency is cheap energy – especially cheap oil.
Climate change odds much worse than thought
The most comprehensive modeling yet carried out on the likelihood of how much hotter the Earth’s climate will get in this century shows that without rapid and massive action, the problem will be about twice as severe as previously estimated six years ago – and could be even worse than that.
Ten ways to Twitter our way to hyper-local sustainability
Recently, we have had amazing breakthroughs in human communications. We have broken the four-minute mile, and the real-time web of living in the moment has arrived. You can now be instantly witnessed around the world by anyone with a modern communications device. There are useful applications for this technology that can be immediately applied to community-building.
