Consumption & Demand

Energy in the UK – Dec 4

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-The UK Power Generation Expenditure Forecast 2010-2030
-How many cyclists does it take to power a hairdryer?
-Energy bills could rise to more than £2,000, says Ofgem
-Solar industry ‘in limbo’ as grants dry up

Last gasps on the road to Copenhagen – Dec 3

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-U.S. Lethargy at Copenhagen Might Be Best for Climate
-Global warming is happening now
-Climate and Capitalism
-The Manufactured Doubt industry and the hacked email controversy
-Disagreeable truth about the coming Copenhagen charade
-Is global warming unstoppable?
-The Urgent Threat To World Peace Is … Canada

Peak Moment 155: Peak Oil: Adapting for Big Changes Ahead

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With a long-time eye to declining energy resources, Bart Anderson envisions a very different society in five years. The former editor of Energy Bulletin.net offers advice for post-oil living: Understand the problem. Prepare psychologically for big shifts and the unexpected. Find your niche and get good at it. See what your great grandparents did as a model for living well within limits. “Live poor and learn to do it well” as Bart did as a graduate student. Things will be very different, he said, but we’ll make it through.

Moloch’s Children: Do Climate Skeptics and Climate Change Activists Need to Agree?

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I’ve gottten literally dozens of emails begging me to weigh in on the East Anglia climate scandal, and for a while, I was reluctant to do so, because ultimately, paying attention to something so inane just gives it credibility. We’re back, again, to the old battles over climate change — attention to trivialities in the absence of the central issue.

Peak Oil: The Eventual End of the Oil Age

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We cannot be lulled into a false sense of security: though oil prices have declined from their historic highs, there is little doubt that peak oil is real. A 2008 research project completed at Washington University in St. Louis found strong evidence in support of the theory. Please feel free to circulate this academic document as a primer on peak oil.

Peak Ego and the Ego Descent Plan

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It is logical to speak of peak ego, since cheap oil gave rise to affluence which in turn gave rise to more separation, separation in the meaning that affluence has offered us NOT to need each other the way tribal communities in the past did. Instead we have a lifestyle that separates us from the inherent wisdom of interdependence. When we have reached the ultimate separation perhaps we have reached peak ego. How much more ego can we have before the level of ‘happiness’ runs out?

In Defense of Sustainable Business

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Unless and until we mobilize a mass movement to take down and transform the U.S. legal, political and economic systems upholding the fiction that corporations possess the same constitutional rights as individuals, along with other hallmarks of corporate power, it is fruitless to blame green consumers for the failure to spur large-scale meaningful change.