Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Lately I’ve been encountering articles and news stories touting the need for revolution in the wake of a gansterized U.S. financial system and a government that has itself become a criminal enterprise. I sense that many bloggers and their readers are salivating with anticipation that someone or something will light the fuse of a revolutionary cannon that will eviscerate the present system and replace it with something more just and humane.
-Germany targets switch to 100% renewables for its electricity by 2050
-Report sees need for 500 additional biofuels plants
-No link between wind turbines and health: report
-Residents reject wind farm health findings
-Locally Owned Wind Power: Quaint it Ain’t
Luke Skywalker had to master the ways of the Force to save the galaxy. We face a similar challenge — mastering the ways of energy, which are surprisingly counterintuitive to people raised in current ways of thinking — in order to make use of the limited options still open to us in an age of declining energy supplies.
One of the striking controversies about the massive BP Deepwater Horizon oil well blowout has been alarm raised about chemical dispersants used to hold spilled crude oil deep in the Gulf of Mexico. Prospects for oil’s direct harm to the environment, the economy, and coastal society were immediately obvious. But why were people so concerned that dispersing the oil was bad—worse than allowing it to come onshore? Is this just a case of “out of sight, out of mind” to benefit the oil company, or are there larger benefits that reduce the harms to other interests?
It now appears that the run-away oil well will soon be brought under control and will stop gushing into the Gulf. While the litigation, cleanup, and economic impact of the sub-sea blowout are likely to go on for years, if not decades, the world’s attention will soon shift elsewhere. Even now the economic and employment impact of the administration’s drilling embargo is moving to center stage as attention shifts to the possibility of a US political upheaval at the mid-term elections — now less than four months away.
-Food prices to rise by up to 40% over next decade, UN report warns
-Just Not Made that Way
-How Goldman gambled on starvation
-Nitrogen and Phosphorus: The Future of Toilet Design Hangs in the Balance
-Eating to Live or Living to Eat?
Ten years ago, energy analyst Steve Andrews challenged widely respected energy guru Amory Lovins via email for what Andrews thought was an overly optimistic vision—about coal consumption trends, evolution in the auto industry, future world oil production, etc.—articulated in the Rocky Mountain Institute‘s Spring 2000 newsletter. …Ten years later, read it for the blind spots everyone had.
One of the enduring archetypes of popular culture is the quest for some lost tome of ancient and forgotten wisdom. Ironically, books that fit that description tolerably well are among the core resources for a “green wizardry” that could revive the old appropriate technology movement for a world on the far side of Hubbert’s peak. The Archdruid explains…
There is growing recognition of the need for increased access to drinkable water across the world and for water treatment approaches that improve the quality of the delivered water and re-establish a balance between human and natural systems…Localized, networked water treatment systems improve access to potable water, encourage the development and diffusion of innovations through reduced financial and technical risks, lower the potential of total system failure, and provide easier trial and replacement of specific innovations and greater organizational capacity.
It wasn’t supposed to turn out this way. The industrialized world was supposed to have time to prepare alternatives to oil. Or so goes the mainstream story.
Although the distinction is subtle, it is crucial: while we should adopt these Plan B measures, what I am arguing against is the celebration of them. For when we celebrate them, we indicate to ourselves and each other that these are more than first steps, that they can save us or provide an ultimate solution.
Warning: This article is blasphemous. How can a former professor of history and psychology write an article with this title? Is the author simply a disgruntled doomer who has become hopelessly cynical?
