Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Economic recovery may look anaemic, especially against the backdrop of the Eurozone crisis, but measured in CO2 the downturn is over. After falling by 1.3% in 2009, global emissions are set to bounce 3% this year. Worse, the emissions cuts pledged at Copenhagen last year fall 40% short of what’s needed to limit warming to 2 degrees and avoid runaway climate change…
Transition tends to appeal to what academics call the ‘post-consumerists’ i.e. those who have reached a level of sufficient wealth and education to feel comfortable in letting go of some of it, who are often, but not always, white and middle-class. However, if Transition is serious about creating resilient communities but fails to create a process over which all sections of the community feel some sense of ownership, it will not truly be creating resilience.
-Welcome to Farm School
-FoodWorks Unveiled: A New Vision for NYC’s Food System
-The Distillers Grains (DDGS) Export Market
-Global food prices may be even higher next year, warns new UN report
Thanks to Dave Ewolt for his response to my piece “Peak oil risks becoming an apolcalyptic cult.” I would like to respond to some of his excellent points. I agree that peak oil and climate change are grave threats to human civilization. I hope things will turn out as rosy as Dave seems to think. But I am sure that to help things turn out as well as they can, peak oil and climate activists need to do a much better job reaching out to the mainstream. To start with, it’s time to go beyond telling stories of either societal collapse or re-localized paradise.
-Rural area depopulation is in part due to lack of surrounding natural beauty
-Climate change scepticism is about more than just science
-I Believe: ‘For us to survive and thrive in a new century, we must peaceably dismantle the United States of Empire’
The cover of the current Atlantic promises to tell “why the future of clean energy is dirty coal,” but the article is necessarily sparing with evidence that emissions from burning coal can be economically “sequestered” (or kept out of the atmosphere).
Once a year, the International Energy Agency (IEA) releases its World Energy Outlook (WEO), and it’s our tradition here at ChrisMartenson.com to review it. A lot of articles have already been written on the WEO 2010 report, and I don’t wish to tread an already well-worn path, but the subject is just too important to leave relegate to a single week of attention.
Exploring Ethnobiology is a new series Deconstructing Dinner has been airing since June. With seemingly more and more people becoming interested in developing closer relationships with our surroundings (our food, the earth), there’s much we can all learn from ethnobiologists, and in particular, from the symbiotic human-earth relationships that so many peoples around the world have long maintained. In the first half of the episode, we listen in on some of that discussion and in the second half, we listen to Associate Professor at Cornell University’s Department of Horticulture, Jane Mt. Pleasant, whose research has involved a fascinating comparative look into 17th/18th century cereal grain farming between the Iroquois people of what is now upstate New York and early European colonizers.
Uno de los mejores y más inspiradores capítulos de Peak Moment. En esta ocasión, Janaia Donaldson entrevista a Judy Alexandre, una mujer que ha convertido su jardín, y parte del de su vecino, en una auténtica mina de producción de alimentos. Descubre su ingenioso sistema para recoger y canalizar el agua de lluvia y conoce a sus abejas, lombrices y gallinas. Un verdadero Ejemplo Alternativo.
The International Economics Agency today released their World Income Outlook, which predicts an incredible 564 percent increase in the median world income over the next three months. IEA Chief Economics Officer Brandon Blighted reports, “Our meticulous research clearly shows that an overwhelming majority of people, especially the Chinese, want more money – a lot more, in fact. With demand for income rising, it appears that the economy has little choice but to produce more well-paying jobs and excessive bonuses. That’s what we’re assuming, anyway.”
The Very Important Paper recently ran an article that might have been tailor made for one of my old classes – it was a perfect illustration of how not to write a persuasive or expository essay. Written by Clifford Krauss and appearing in the New York Times November 17 Energy Supplement, it provides a superb model for the young (or old) writer on what not to do, and in a sense I’m grateful for this illustration. I apologize to my readership then, for digressing into my past profession, and offering a brief lesson on how not to write about peak oil for the interested.
In the peak oil community, predictions that society is about to collapse are coming faster and louder than usual. Should we heed these warnings? Or be skeptical?
