Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
This essay is a follow-up to Monday’s The Law Of Civilization And Decay, which you should be familiar with before proceeding. Economist James K. Galbraith posed the question Who Are These Economists, Anyway? Based on the historical investigations of Christopher Lasch, my answer was that they are the High Priests of Progress.
-Rise in wheat prices fastest since 1973
-Reviving Anarchy For The Sake Of Sustainability
-Foodprint Project: Exploring Food and Cities, and Cities and Food
-Agroecological farming methods being ignored, says UN expert
-How to feed a hungry world
-How to start growing food on social housing estates
-Shorter, cheaper vacations the new normal
-The Work-Sharing Boom: Exit Ramp to a New Economy?
-Work-Life Balance Reconsidered
-It’s official: We’re all burnt out
But let us not for a second believe that this drama is not staged, that all these foundations of consumerism (though less so the consumerism) are not fully approved and applauded by the writers, reporters, and editors of NPR, even if they should be forgiven for knowing not what they do. For there is no reluctance to talk about the “good news from Wall Street” or the “positive developments in consumer spending,” not an instant of caution or reflective ambivalence.
A midweek roundup of peak oil news, including:
-Supply and demand
-IEA’s monthly oil market report
In what may be President Obama’s most significant foray into changing U.S.-Africa policy since his election in 2008, the United States is embarking on a new initiative to boost agricultural production in the global south. Feed the Future (FTF) came out of the G8 summit in L’Aquila in 2009 where developed country leaders committed to acting to “achieve sustainable global food security.” Obama pledged $3.5 billion over three years toward this goal, in hopes that other rich nations would also make significant investments in agricultural development.
Dave Gardner’s upcoming documentary looks at modern society and asks, why are we behaving irrationally? There’s overwhelming evidence we’ve reached the limits to growth, yet we continue in our addiction. In searching for a cure, Dave starts with the need to tell different stories and shares examples from several folks he’s interviewed. He highlights an amusing segment which depicts a family’s impacts remaining in their yard! This “crowd-produced” film will also show activities at the community level which could make a huge positive difference. (www.growthbusters.org).
The discussion about our energy supply is full of extremely optimistic expectations. There are many people who believe that full replacement of fossil with renewable energy sources in an extremely short time span is possible.
In unemployed worker groups and common security clubs across the country, participants are facing two grim realities. The first is that jobs that vanished aren’t coming back. And the second reality is that if unemployed workers don’t stand up for themselves, no one else will.
Global warming is not a standalone issue. At the same time as we are trying to decarbonize our entire society and cope with the erratic weather events of early climate change, we are simultaneously being hit with peak oil and economic contraction.
Energy Investment banker and leading peak oil proponent Matthew Simmons died suddenly on Sunday [Aug. 8], following an apparent heart attack. While Simmons did not come up with the idea of peak oil – geophysicist M King Hubbert first published the theory in the 1950s — he arguably did more than anyone to publicize it. It was Simmons’ 2005 classic Twilight in the Desert: The Coming Saudi Oil Shock and the World Economy, that turned discussion of peak oil from a fringe environmental concern into something with business pages credibility.
It just so happened that I’ve been reading Christopher Lasch’s The True And Only Heaven: Progress and It’s Critics when a friend sent me Philip Mirowski’s The Great Mortification Economist’s Responses to the Crisis of 2007-(and counting). This latter article led me to James K. Galbraith’s Who Are These Economists, Anyway?…I will go a small but significant way toward answering this question today in the first of a series of essays on where we stand in the Modern Age. I can only touch on the main concepts today.
