By Kurt Cobb, Resource Insights
Underneath all the disorder we see in our pandemic-plagued economic, social and political lives is the crumbling of key assumptions about what we call modernity, a period of "enlightenment" that has supposedly freed us from the past.
By Kurt Cobb, Resource Insights
Many big-city dwellers appear to be seeking refuge in less crowded towns and rural landscapes. The wealthy, at least, are seeking "bugout" homes away from major cities as places to ride out the pandemic, the economic downturn and the civil unrest that are gripping the world.
By Stan Cox, Resilience.org
The severe heat is driving almost all social gatherings and group activities into enclosed, air-conditioned spaces. Getting together these days in the cool indoor world can dramatically raise the risk of coronavirus infection.
By Bart Anderson, Resilence.org
Coronavirus has prompted millions of people to get back on their bicycles. We need to get out and exercise, have fun with our families, avoid the risks of mass transit. It's the biggest boom in bicycles since the 1970s. Sales are skyrocketing, cities are painting bicycle lanes, car traffic is down. Will it last? (First in a series)
By Richard Heinberg, Resilience.org
Back in March, I wrote that the nation’s response to the coronavirus pandemic would likely shape its economic, political, and geopolitical fortunes for years or decades to come. Four months later, it’s time for a check-in. How’s that pandemic response going? ... Keep an eye on that snow-covered mountainside.
By Kurt Cobb, Resource Insights
As long as we think of COVID-19 as simply an implacable foe that must be vanquished, it is unlikely that we will learn to live with it or to deal effectively with the next pandemic.
By David Bollier, David Bollier blog
It has been an awful and amazing two weeks – a time of reckoning that is long overdue, a time of coming together that, despite the tragic circumstances, has been enlivening. What is so remarkable is that the Black Lives Matter protests have been nested within a larger, unprecedented trauma, the pandemic.
By Alice Friedemann, energyskeptic.com
With global demand having fallen by about 29 million barrels per day from a year ago, it seems like this pandemic might delay peak oil production while the pandemic and consequent depression lasts, since so much less oil is being consumed.
By Sharon Kelly, DeSmog Blog
The oil, gas, and petrochemical industries have taken a massive financial blow from the COVID-19 pandemic, but its financial troubles preexisted the emergence of the novel coronavirus and are likely to extend far into the future, past the end to measures aimed at curbing the spread of the disease.
By Ugo Bardi, Cassandra's legacy
If you are a chemist, you know very well how catalysts can work small miracles: you had been trying for some time to have a reaction occur, without success, then you add a little pinch of something and - suddenly - things go "bang." In no time, the reaction is complete. Of course, as a chemist you know that catalysts don't really work miracles: all they can do is to accelerate reaction that would occur anyway.
By Rapid Transition Alliance Staff, Rapid Transition Alliance
How quickly, in peacetime democracies, are people prepared radically to change their behaviour? The Covid-19 pandemic provides some clues. One of the most common measures introduced to control its spread has been the ‘stay at home’ order. Normally known as ‘lockdown’ ... To an extraordinary degree, people have complied, and this is not the first time populations have accepted and adapted to suddenly introduced behaviour changes.
By Asher Miller, Rob Dietz, Jason Bradford, Resilience.org
Besides lessons in ethics (and in Asher’s case, lessons in the English language), the Brady Bunch offers up a metaphor about the fault lines in American politics -- fault lines that include the undermining of government, extreme individualism, race and class divides, and capitalist and corporate excesses.