Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
While much higher oil prices three or four years from now, coming from new production failing to keep up with depletion of existing fields seem highly likely, the current issue is whether prices will climb into economy-damaging territory in 2009, 2010, or 2011.
I am going to make an argument I don’t see much. Reading the pros and cons on this subject is a bit like watching a pea roll around on a plate. My goal is to stick a fork in that pea and focus on something very fundamental. The point I will make is that one can say with high confidence bordering on certainty that only a predominantly local food system will ever be sustainable.
-Oil giants zero in on untapped Greenland
-Norway cuts arctic barrel count
-IEA Raises 2009, 2010 Oil Demand Forecasts on Growth (Update2)
-The Zero Growth Mind
-The Peasantry of the Future
-The Virtues of Deglobalization: Has the time finally come to reverse and end globalization?
-Norman Borlaug dies at 95; revolutionized grain agriculture and won Nobel Peace Prize
-Reflections on the Life of Norman Borlaug
-Nobel Prize winner, science pioneer, famine fighter Norman Borlaug, R.I.P.
-Norman Borlaug on the Food Crisis
-The Global Food Crisis: The End of Plenty
-Norman Borlaug Dead
A weekly review including:
– Prices and Production
– The IEA Revises its Forecast
– The recovery?
– Briefs
Steven Kopits, who runs the New York office of Douglas Westwood, was in Denver last week. He talked about his latest paper on peak oil and the economy with Steve Andrews and will share related remarks at the ASPO-USA conference next month. Steve popped a few questions:…
The trend in media this decade has been for the gritty, non-politically correct analysis and muckraking to be primarily found on the internet. The content of conventional media is largely confined to a narrow band around conventional institutional views…As we live through growing disconnects between perception and reality, the abstract and the concrete, and the aware and the blissful, I thought an imaginary press conference among some conventional luminaries might highlight some truths via its juxtaposition.
Another week, another ‘giant’ oil find, leading to predictable claims that ‘peak oil theory’ is toast. Shame nobody bothered to put the numbers in context, but then that’s what ODAC is for…
-Efforts to turn empty lots to a glass half full
-Obama’s Speech: The Doctor Is In
-Tom Friedman, our one-party democracy, and the clean energy jobs message
-Risk Pool
-South Korea’s Hyundai Steel building ‘green mill’
-Is Resource Nationalism Back?
-A Power Station in Your Basement
One of the reasons discussions of whether “organic” and “local” can “feed the world” often founder so badly is the whole set of presumptions that preceed such a discussion. So let’s talk about those – James McWilliams’ book _Just Food_ and others have stirred up a good bit of controversy on this subject, and lots of people seem to know the answers. But the real problem is that most people don’t really seem to understand what the questions are.
