Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Discussion: Perceptive readers have probably wondered about the strange mix of topics we’ve covered — ranging from floods and fisheries to tourism development and drug production. What is the relationship between these issues and their significance to this voyage’s “theme of exploring the effects of climate on Mexico’s coastline?” This might be a good opportunity for a bird’s-eye view, using island examples and past societies for perspective.
A weekly roundup of peak oil news, including:
-Oil and the global economy
-China – the costs of growth
-Macondo – the blame game
“How to Boil a Frog” is that rare beast, a funny movie about peak oil, climate change, etc. Early versions have been circulating to the delight of those lucky enough to see it. It’s good news indeed that the movie will now be viewable by the public.
like most modern people, self-described progressives are also accustomed to technological fixes for nearly every problem and challenge, and the very possibility that some breakthrough technology or solution isn’t just around the corner is scarcely fathomable
Cairn Energy announced this week that it had found evidence “indicative of an active hydrocarbon system” off Greenland. The news comes in the middle of a bidding round for oil and gas exploration licences there. The US Geological Survey estimated in 2008 that the region contains approximately 90 billion barrels of technically recoverable oil, but producing the stuff would combine the extreme challenges of deepwater drilling, extreme cold, and ice. Any accident would be massively harder to deal with than Deepwater Horizon because of the country’s remoteness…
A few days ago I gave a keynote address to the International Society for Ecological Economics which was held in Bremen, Germany. First time teleconferencing for a keynote, which was a nice, minimal carbon way to get the message out. Afterwards, people in the audience asked for some more detail on high-tech self-providing [HTSP]. Here’s my answer to them…
One thing that fascinates me about political theorist Murray Bookchin’s writing is how prescient it is. His essay, “Ecology and Revolutionary Thought,” was written in 1965, six years before Earth Day, and almost a half-century before now. Yet its content is as relevant as ever, if not more so, given society’s increasing interest in all things “green.” Bookchin even references future ramifications of climate change, long before many had even considered it.
I’ve had a bee in my bonnet for a while now about the need for a paradigm shift. This began when I came up with the title for a paper: ‘Let’s Twist Again: Time for a Real Copernican Revolution’. Don’t worry, this is the sort of party game academics get up to – yes really! My own favourite is ‘Haydn Sikh: The Adaptation of the Classical Form in Britain’s Minority Religious Communities’, or something like that.
-BP loses Arctic drilling race due to Gulf oil disaster
-Greenland happy to be the new oil frontier
-Danes block Greenpeace vessel in Arctic
On this part 8 of our Conscientious Cooks series, we listen in on a really interesting panel discussion hosted in 2008 by the Center for Urban Education about Sustainable Agriculture (or CUESA) located in San Francisco, California. The panel was themed around the concept of Climate Friendly Eating.
-The Erosion of America’s Middle Class
-Death by Growth: What the Climate-Bill Autopsies Missed
-The Federal Reserve Enters Decline
-Deflation and you: Acting perfectly sensibly
-Forget the ‘big society’; we just need a co-operative one
-Chinese scholar: Will Chinese workers challenge global capitalism
A month into BP’s Gulf of Mexico oil catastrophe, the US press began to say that the crisis might be ‘Obama’s 9/11’. It was a comparison that Obama himself repeated a couple of weeks later. Hyperbole? Perhaps – but the disaster certainly opens up space for thinking about alternatives to the industry that created it.
