Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
What can you do to optimize your chances in the case of hyperinflation, a deflationary economic Depression, an oil crisis, a famine, or a series of horrendous environmental disasters? If you don’t already know, you’d better wise up fast—because some or all of these exciting opportunities are on their way to a neighborhood near you! In fact, one or two may already be tapping you on the shoulder and asking to make your acquaintance.
The British government is making a review of current, ongoing global shortages of vital raw materials. This will go beyond the notion of peak oil to look at the supply of a series of key natural resources, following rises in commodity prices, food riots and accusations that various countries – particularly China and Japan – are beginning to stockpile important minerals in an attempt to protect their businesses from global competition.
South Asians are seeing more work on the ground and hearing more policy announcements about urban development than ever before. For many who live in and around towns and cities in Bangladesh, Pakistan and India (where South Asia’s biggest cities lie) this could be a good thing. The trouble is: national governments and planning authorities in Dhaka, Islamabad and New Delhi are tending more and more to follow a single ideology – economic growth will drive down poverty – and a primary route to that misplaced objective, which is greater urbanisation.
One aspect of the predicament of industrial society too rarely grasped is the impact of the end of the age of cheap abundant energy on labor costs, wages, and standards of living. In a world where everything is scarce but people, many of the most deeply rooted economic assumptions bid fair to be stood on their heads, with results few of us are prepared to face.
Amid today’s varying attempts to imagine a postpetroleum America, one very likely equivalent has received little attention — the impoverished, dysfunctional nations of the contemporary Third World. Maybe it’s time to consider the possibility.
The role of corporate influence in maintaining an increasingly dysfunctional status quo has been much discussed in peak oil circles, and various remedies proposed. The irony here is that effective remedies for the antisocial behavior of corporations are ready to hand, if we make a collective choice to use them — and that choice may be made sooner than many people currently expect.
“as mankind proceeded to get bigger and bigger we silently crossed a threshold”
Not deterred by the international financial crisis which became widespread in 2008 or by the many recessionary patterns that grip most country economies, financial engineers are massing in København to prepare for the next wave. This one is about the commercial opportunities which renewable energy technologies, country climate funds and sectoral mitigation programmes promise to contain.
We cannot be lulled into a false sense of security: though oil prices have declined from their historic highs, there is little doubt that peak oil is real. A 2008 research project completed at Washington University in St. Louis found strong evidence in support of the theory. Please feel free to circulate this academic document as a primer on peak oil.
-Obama and Hu aim to agree greenhouse gas targets
-China’s empty city
-China’s Blunt Talk for Obama
-Market cornered for rare minerals
-Chinese credit card debt mounts
One of the most rarely used resources for relocalization projects is the fact that our species has been this way before — the twilight years of many other civilizations featured the breakup of centralized economic arrangements and the rise of a new localism. Can insights from past examples offer us guidance in the present case?
The claim that market forces will inevitably take care of energy shortfalls due to peak oil is common enough these days. Unfortunately for such optimistic notions, there’s reason to think that in an environment of economic contraction caused by geological limits to energy, market forces may well push money away from any investments that could help the situation.
