Shale gas – prospects & fears – Jan 24
-IEA doubles global gas reserves estimates
-Shareholders challenge gas companies on fracking
-Gasland: the review
-UK government rejects calls for shale gas moratorium
Media & Communications
How do I love thee?
How can we be required to purchase what already belongs to us? Such a plan was not part of the election campaign and has no public mandate, but how might resistance be most effectively organised? …my suggestion is that we lobby our local authorities to revive our ancient woodland rights.
Tradable Energy Quotas: A policy framework for peak oil and climate change
The purpose of TEQs is not to limit the consumption of individuals per se, but rather to share out fairly the shrinking energy budget required by national circumstances, and to allow maximum freedom of choice within that.
The food bubble
You have seen food prices going up at the local grocery store. That could be just the beginning. According to Lester Brown, a leading expert in both the environment and world agriculture, those bulging supermarket shelves are part of a “food bubble”, which could crash. Brown compares our world food situation to the real estate bubble in the United States.
ODAC Newsletter – Jan 21
BP increased its exposure to the ‘wild east’ this week through a new joint venture with the state-owned Russian oil giant Rosneft. Given the rocky history of its existing joint venture, TNK-BP, the deal illustrates the risks BP has been forced to take to gain access to meaningful oil resources…
What if we stopped fighting for preservation and fought economic growth instead?
There is no durable sanctuary from economic growth. Any park that is made by legislation can be unmade by legislation. Governments change and so do circumstances. But growth continues and natural capital shrinks. And things are not even desperate yet.
Art, activism, and permaculture
The Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination is not an institution or a group, not a network nor an NGO, but an affinity of friends who recognize the beauty of collective creative disobedience…Creation and resistance are the entwined DNA strands of the Lab’s practice. It sees art and activism as inseparable from everyday life. Its experiments aim not to make art but to shape reality, not to show you the world but to change it together.
Cool ideas – Jan 21
-Fueling the Food Revolution: CoFed to train New Generation of Student Leaders
-How Sweden turns human body heat into useful energy
-Vision: 8 Reasons Global Capitalism Makes Our Lives Worse — And How We Can Create a New Kind of Economy
Limits to debt
The latest release from Richard Heinberg’s upcoming book—working title The End of Growth. What are the limits to debt, and how close are we to hitting them?
Microcredit: The good, the bad, and the ugly
For more than twenty years, microcredit has been widely heralded as the remedy for world poverty. Recent news stories, however, have sullied microcredit’s glowing reputation with reports on scandals, exorbitant compensation to managers, skyrocketing interest rates, and aggressive marketing schemes.
An epidemic of ignorance
I was at my local watering hole one night talking to a professor at Carnegie Mellon University when, after several libations, I suddenly heard myself exclaiming when did everybody get stupid? By stupid, I did not mean mentally slow or impaired. Rather, I meant ignorant or untrained to think. As with so many other things, I believe you can lay this at the feet of a culture dominated by corporations, aka. the “consumer” society.
Energy security
So what should we do? We must be explicit about why we want good domestic climate and energy policy. Let’s say that it is needed to achieve peace and stability. Let’s say that climate change and competition for dwindling energy reserves are both causes of instability and violence. We should make it clear that there the other causes of instability and violence – like nuclear proliferation and inequality – need to be dealt with too. Finally let’s be very clear that our vision for renewables and good domestic climate policy is totally inconsistent with the dominant approach to security.
