Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Rising food prices leading to riots, protests, and revolts, mounting oil prices, mammoth worldwide unemployment, and a collapsed recovery — it looks like the perfect set of preconditions for a global tsunami of instability and turmoil. Events in Algeria and Tunisia give us just an inkling of what this maelstrom might look like, but where and how it will next erupt, and in what form, is anyone’s guess.
It’s not the apocalypse. And it’s certainly not the Death Star or the planet Tatooine. But The Windup Girl is a compelling vision of our industrial world as it could be in a low-energy future. Paolo Bacigalupi’s techno-political thriller imagines how, in the time after peak oil and economic collapse, global trade could return via airships and GMOs.
– Tunisia: People Power Succeeds Without Western Backing
– The First WikiLeaks Revolution?
– How Tunisian Facebookers Will Change Newsrooms
– Timing, success and meaning of the Tunisian uprising
– Tunisia’s military putting boot on ‘Jasmine Revolution’
– Jordanians march against inflation
Could this be a popular revolution to topple the regime? … One thing is sure: there is a political awareness being created now among the Tunisian people and especially among the youth — a sense of historic possibility that what was deemed impossible may actually be within reach.
Across the Arab world, peoples are experiencing hope, and the regimes are afraid: all the Arab people and all the Arab regimes.
– Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali forced to flee Tunisia as protesters claim victory
– This Is The Wikileak That Sparked The Tunisian Crisis
– What’s Happening In Tunisia, Explained
The events of a single day in three continents are a lesson in the interlocking crises that will define the decade.
– How the Recession Changed Us (graphic)
– Gail Tverberg: Oil Limits Overview
– The Japan Myth
– East and west converge on a problem
– Global Crisis – A Russian Perspective (Boris Kagarlitsky interview)
– Marx at a book signing, speaks on crisis
Coal will not be able to replace the other fossil fuels. Whether extraction peaks in 2011 or in 2050, the probabilities of coal on its own being able to help the world avoid the Olduvai cliff are slim at best.
Certainly, this fossil fuel can still become more relevant as a fuel in some regions of the world.
This can occur in the US for instance, if reported reserves are anywhere near a geological reality. In such places, coal can provide time for a smoother transition to a fully renewable energy paradigm, but on a global scale, the panorama is entirely different.
For states or nations that are net importers today but do not possess realistic reserve perspectives, the use of coal is more a thing of the past than of the future.
Right here in the desert southwest, in fact, one of the last great “common pool resource” systems in North America provides irrigation water and open grazing land to farmers and pastoralists. Derived from the imported culture of Spanish settlers (via the Arabic Moors who brought the concept to Iberia previously) and combined with the best practices of the native peoples of the region, the acequia system is a powerful example of how we might envision people working together not only with each other but with the land itself.
– How I learned to stop worrying and love the Saudis
– Bolivia: Morales Repeals Decree Raising Fuel Prices
– Tax on Carbon: The Only Way to Save Our Planet? (James Hansen)
– Crafting Energy Security in the 21st Century: A German View of the Challenge
– Why Wikileaks will be the death of big business and big government
– A Physicist Solves the City
– The Biodiversity Blunder
– Out with the old politics
– US embassy cables: Ireland grappling with climate change and energy
ASPO-USA and Peak Oil Review have combined to pull together predictions about what we can expect in 2011 from a wide range of thinkers, writers, scholars and experts, who graciously agreed to risk being wrong so that you can have the inside scoop!
