Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
– 350.org: Implementing local solutions, one neighborhood at a time.
– Totnes: Britain’s town of the future
– One on One: Jane McGonigal, (Peak Oil) Game Designe
– Will Carbon Nation succeed where An Inconvenient Truth failed?
– Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us (RSA video)
Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi’s threat to fight to the death rather than cede power set off a rising tide of violence this week which has seen hundreds, maybe thousands killed. The future of the regime and the country still hangs in the balance. The growing chaos has also spread to Libya’s oil industry as companies shut down production and foreign workers flee.
Social, political, demographic, and other conditions in Libya are significantly different than in Egypt, Tunisia, Bahrain or elsewhere, so it is not surprising that the progress of the revolution has differed too.
We should shoot for health and wellness rather than wealth and “hellness,” and agree to move, together, away from a lifestyle of deadlines and dying species and toward lifelines and living wealth…The big picture is that production and consumption will no longer be the defining characteristics of the emerging era – cultural richness, efficiency, cooperation, expression, ecological design, and biological restoration will be.
A midweek roundup of peak oil news, including:
-Developments this week
-Saudi ruler offers $36bn to stave off uprising amid warning oil price could double
-Political unrest casts a shadow over Desertec energy project
-All eyes on Bahrain as Gulf tremors frighten oil markets
-Iran’s ‘silent’ protests
We need some balance in the Libyan oil story. Is this north African nation an unmitigated disaster for those elsewhere in the world running an economy or driving a gas-guzzling vehicle? Notwithstanding the turmoil, the answer so far is no.
The point here is not to say “we were right” but simply to underline the central observation with which we launched this project: the world we live in is being turned upside down by a series of converging crises. This process has not finished: it has only just begun, and it’s likely to get faster, deeper, harder. We can choose how to react to it, but there’s no going back.
Maybe western leaders are afraid that, having seen what it is like when a people dictate to their government what it should do for them, rather than the reverse, we might start to take our own rights back, wholesale.
As elsewhere in the region, the main foreign powers involved — France, Spain, and the US — don’t seem to care much as long as the oil and gas flows, the country implements World Bank/IMF structural adjustment programs to modernize the oil industry to increase output, and their ‘strategic interests’ are protected. As long as these things happen, the country can go to hell in a hand basket – as it has. None of them have lifted a finger in protest to government practices and corruption.
-Mexico goes back to the land
-Corn’s Domino Effect
-Stop the global land grab
-From Food Crisis to Food Sovereignty: The Challenge of Social Movements
-Revolutions could rob Opec of its ability to manipulate supply
-IEA sees oil price danger, ready to use stockpiles
-Saudi Denial Not What it Seems
-Judge Tells Government to Resume Permits for Drilling
-Gulf spill’s effects ‘may not be seen for a decade’
