Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
– Glenn Beck embraces simplicity (for real!)
– 21 Holiday Gift Ideas for the Permaculture and Guerrilla Gardening Activists in Your Life
– NYT: The Beekeeper Next Door
– The UK Crash Course… now online and available free to all UK Transition initiatives…
– Why not eat insects? (video) – new!
The UN Climate Conference (COP16) in Cancun is turning out to be both anti-climactic and anti-climatic. There will be no major agreement to stop global warming this week, despite the timed release of a number of reports that show that the phenomenon is advancing more rapidly than expected, with lethal consequences. There likely will be announcements of progress in schemes to allow contaminating industries and nations to continue with business as usual and add another lucrative area to their portfolios—trade in carbon offsets and credits. It’s a worst-case scenario for the planet.
A midweekly roundup of peak oil news, including:
-Developments this week
-Nigeria
-Redefining Prosperity
-Finding Rootedness in the Age of Vulnerability
-Transition: The Sacred, The Scared, and The Scarred
-Treading Softly: Paths to Ecological Order
-The “Stuff” of the American Energy Footprint
– No Impact Experiment: A One Week Carbon Cleanse from No-Impact Man
– Peak oil to drive changes in Dunedin NZ (new report NOW ONLINE)
– Bringing Transition to the airport near you
– Bicycle freight: thinking outside the box truck
A weekly roundup of peak oil news, including:
-Oil and the Global Economy
-OPEC’s spare capacity
-Asia
-Offshore Drilling
-Briefs
-Quote of the week
“Our governments are incompetent at best, corrupt and greedy at worst, and people now get that. What Karl Rove couldn’t accomplish, Hillary Clinton is driving home.”
The Obama administration announced this week that it has reversed its decision to open up new leases in areas of the Eastern Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic coast. The intention to lift the moratorium which had been in place since 2006 was made weeks before the Deepwater Horizon oil disaster. See the recent UKITPOES paper for more on the likely impact of the Gulf of Mexico disaster on oil production…
Considering climate change, Copenhagen, Cochabamba, the coming calamity, and most controversial: capitalism.
What is missing from most modern stories is the notion of physical resource limits. Such limits imply a tragic trajectory, the possibility of failure and punishment for overuse of the physical world. In the last half century the scientific literature has been infused with increasingly ominous warnings about such limits. But popular stories accessible to the mass of humanity, at least in rich countries, still most often champion explicitly or implicitly the ideas of a limitless material future.
Economic recovery may look anaemic, especially against the backdrop of the Eurozone crisis, but measured in CO2 the downturn is over. After falling by 1.3% in 2009, global emissions are set to bounce 3% this year. Worse, the emissions cuts pledged at Copenhagen last year fall 40% short of what’s needed to limit warming to 2 degrees and avoid runaway climate change…
Large and complex systems, particularly in remote and environmentally challenging environments such as wind farms, especially off shore, will probably be early renewable energy casualties of the decline in oil supply.
