Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Last night’s presidential speech on the Gulf oil spill had been pre-billed by the Washington Post as Barack Obama’s “Jimmy Carter moment.” But reading any of Carter’s speeches (a good one to start with is that of April 18, 1977) side by side with last night’s bromide is an invitation to nostalgia and bitter disappointment.
In the first post of this series, I mentioned my initial encounter with winemaking and wine drinking on an island in Lake Erie, after which I read anything and everything I could find about wine. One of the first books I read was Leon D. Adams’ The Wines of America, a book long since out of print. While reading it, I was very surprised to learn that Ohio was once the leading wine producing state!
In 2006 when I first met Julian Darley, author of _High Noon for Natural Gas_ and the founder of the Post-Carbon Institute, the world was excited by then-famous “Jack” oil field find in the Gulf of Mexico. Both of us were watching the way the world was interpreting the data – people were claiming that there might be 10, 12, 15 billion barrels of oil – five miles down underneath the ocean…Darley, framing the issue brilliantly, observed that “this isn’t salvation, this is digging around in the couch cushions for loose change.”
So here I am. I fully intended to be giving the England match my full attention right now, but I’ve been left distinctly restive by this afternoon’s long session by Stoneleigh of The Automatic Earth, and feel the need to put some thoughts down.
“If we refuse to take into account the full cost of our fossil fuel addiction—if we don’t factor in the environmental costs and national security costs and true economic costs—we will have missed our best chance to seize a clean energy future.”
–President Barack Obama, Carnegie Mellon University, June 2, 2010
Albert Bates is an expert in: permaculture, biochar, agriculture, law, politics and probably a few areas I’ve forgotten to mention. He’s been a leading thinker and practitioner of sustainable living since he became a resident of The Farm in 1972. This wide-ranging interview will explore his thoughts on many topics – a must hear interview!!
Crude oil in the gulf yields good TV images, but BP and its contractors have untapped a geyser not only of oil, but of methane–more than 20 time as effective as CO2 at holding heat. The percentage of the gush that’s methane is roughly estimated at 40-50%, subject to verification.
In all of the descriptions of perilous situations that I have studied, arising during adventures on the high seas or in the high mountains, or during armed conflict, a single mistake rarely proves fatal. More often than not, death comes as a result of a sequence of bad choices which reinforce each other. These choices may not appear bad at the time–but they certainly do in retrospect! The end result is a situation in which no further steps can be taken that would not be either harmful or futile. This is the essence of checkmate: no moves left. At that point, none of the previous moves can be undone. Nor do they even exist, really: they have gone off to an imaginary universe populated by the regretful ghosts of those who didn’t make it.
The Transition Network conference 2010, held at Seale Hayne Agricultural College, was an extraordinary few days. It is a mark of how far the organisation and the concept has come in its 4 year life that it can bring 300 people together for such a deep, challenging and nourishing 3 days. I left feeling deeply honoured to be part of such a dynamic movement, and also of the team that organised the event, an incredible bunch of people.
President Obama triumphantly entered office with the popular promise of moving the United States to a cleaner energy basis, but his actions to date, along with those of the Congress, have promoted two types of dangerous energy developments: off-shore oil drilling and nuclear reactors. Nuclear expert Harvey Wasserman highlighted the dual dangers by noting, “As BP’s ghastly gusher assaults the Gulf of Mexico, a tornado has forced a shutdown of the Fermi 2 atomic reactor at the site of a 1966 melt-down that nearly irradiated the entire Great Lakes Region.”
Boy am I ever humbled to have been featured in the New York Times story ‘Imagining life without oil, and being ready.’
The ongoing economic collapse will not reach completion while the television remains on. Viewers are simply too easily and chronically manipulated by the irresistible medium. Resistance is futile.
