Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Now that I’m retired from the academic life — or rather, now that I’ve departed the academy in disgust and despair — I no longer spend time in my swivel chair, dispensing information on the telephone or tending to the tender young psyche of an overwrought twenty-something.
A weekly roundup of peak oil news, including:
-Production and prices
-the Deepwater horizon
-Venezuela
-Quote of the week
-Briefs
-Energy stat of the week
Like the Indo-Aryan God Shiva, Destroyer of Worlds, marine ecologist Jeremy Jackson is here to turn your comfortable, complacent Mental World upside-down. He’s able to do that because we are destroying the Physical World—in this case, the Earth’s Oceans.
We still don’t have the faintest idea how much oil is spewing out of the well in the Gulf. Nor do we have the faintest idea what the full environmental consequence of what may well be the biggest single-event human-caused. ecological disaster of all time (the very fact that I have to add the word “single-event” to that statement should tell you something). We know that it is almost certainly more than all the low estimates to date, and we know that the ecological consequences will be huge, lasting and we do not understand them.
Chris Johnstone’s ‘Find Your Power’ has just been revised and republished, this time by Permanent Publications. ‘Find Your Power’ is a book that many peobple involved in Transition initiatives have found very useful. Chris is a medical doctor, an addictions specialist and an empowerment coach. He has pioneered the application of positive psychology within the NHS, and is renowned for his workshops and his talks to Transition groups.
Is human activity altering the planet on a scale comparable to major geological events of the past? Scientists are now considering whether to officially designate a new geological epoch to reflect the changes that homo sapiens have wrought: the Anthropocene.
British Petroleum (BP) portrayed itself this past decade as an oil company investing in renewable sources of clean energy for a “Beyond Petroleum” future. BP had many people convinced that it was a very different kind of oil company, but the catastrophic spill this spring in the Gulf of Mexico is shedding light on the true nature of this transnational corporation.
-Growing problem needs radical ideas
-Grasshoppers Garden: What To Read
-Use of local food boosts hospital funds
-Derbyshire village to develop own food label
Area farmers commit to sustainable, local foods
No mass media is as pervasive or intrusive as the American one. Now that we’ve stopped making stuff, more or less, we’re still super prolific at selling our own image. This hypnosis works even on Americans, who should know better. But we don’t live here so much as inside media. The average American watches four hours of television a day, listens to constant music, and there’s also the internet with its Facebook, texting, twitter and email, etc, to distract him.
-Jeremy Jackson: How we wrecked the ocean
-Nature loss ‘to damage economies’
-US climate bill or not, the world is on track
-After the crash – a new direction for climate policy
Congratulations to Mother Jones for dedicating the cover of their May/June 2010 issue to the population crisis. I have worked in the population field for four decades, and since joining the movement in the late 1960s, when the issue was at the forefront of public concern, I have witnessed an alarming decrease in responsible reporting on population issues and the importance of addressing the dramatic growth we are faced with each and every day. So, thank you, Mother Jones, for being one of the few to bring the population issue back to the forefront of public discourse.
A senior House Democrat said that the blowout preventer that failed to stop an oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico had a dead battery in its control pod, leaks in its hydraulic system, a “useless” test version of one of the devices that was supposed to close the flow of oil and a cutting tool that wasn’t strong enough to shear through joints that made up 10 percent of the drill pipe.
