Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
One “emerging consensus view”, even among politicians who continue rooting for economic growth if only to claw tax receipts for paying off swollen national debt, is that world oil demand will ceiling if not crater. Peak Oil has won converts, some of them even able to openly admit it is real, but mostly selling oil saving and oil substitution to consumers as part and parcel of the hunting down of the Evil Molecule called CO2.
Modern humans often imagine themselves invincible, living as a species forever into the future, colonizing space, and perhaps even escaping the destruction of the Sun many billions of years hence. This kind of thinking–grounded in neither geology nor paleontology nor ecology I might add–has created the rather cavalier attitude demonstrated by modern leaders and their citizenry toward the daunting dangers of climate change, resource depletion and ecosystem collapse.
The next case of $120 oil, assuming we get there before the industrial economy falls into the abyss, will be brutal for an already over-stretched American consumer. Banks are falling like dominoes on a mule cart over the bumpy terrain of declining energy supplies. When will the lights go out?
The recent debate between George Monbiot and Paul Kingsnorth over whether we actually can save the world seems mostly to have degenerated into sound and fury, which is rather a problem, since the larger question of whether climate change is stoppable, whether we can avoid having billions of people die, seems, well rather a good one.
-Michael C. Lynch and “the false threat of disappearing oil.”
-The New York Times on Peak Oil – Don’t Worry, Be Happy
-Oil: the Long Goodbye
-150 Years of Plenitude: The Story of Oil
My subject today is the grotesque wealth & income inequality that exists in the United States. I have dubbed our times the new Gilded Age, which was Mark Twain’s name for the post-Civil War period when “the rich wore diamonds and many others wore rags.” I could also have called it the “last” Gilded Age because our slowly disappearing Middle Class will never exist again as it once did.
-As Arctic Ocean warms, megatonnes of methane bubble up
-Ocean Temperature Record and Other Clues: What Is Your Response?
-A ‘Dow Jones’ For Climate: The Case for a Warming Index
-Africa seeks climate change cash
-Top U.N. climate scientist backs big CO2 cuts, 350-ppm goal
-Think health costs are hot now? Factor in global warming
-The fallacy of climate activism
-Canada’s Oil Sands – Part 1
-Squandered Opportunity
-Health Care: Why costs spiral up
-Editorial: The Future of Coal
Town hall meetings being held on health care legislation across the country are exploding with emotion, frustration, and conflict. Citizens are showing up in throngs to speak out, and sometimes to shout, about health care—turning the meetings into a vivid demonstration of what’s missing from American democracy.
-Hooked: George Monbiot on fishing
-Objectors to wind farms to be bought off
-Oil giants destroy rainforests to make palm oil diesel for motorists
-The Gloom in China’s Glowing Economic Stats
-Walker’s World: The China bubble
-China’s wild west
-China pushing yuan as global currency
-Parents warned to avoid ham in bowel cancer alert
-Paris rooftops swarm with bees as urban honey industry takes off
-Urban agriculture key to alleviating world hunger
-Getting Real About the High Price of Cheap Food
-The State of Agricultural Commodity Markets 2009
