Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
On a winter’s day in Boston in 1773, a rally of thousands at Faneuil Hall to protest a new British colonial tax levied on tea turned into an iconic moment in the pre-history of the American Revolution. Some of the demonstrators — Sons of Liberty, they called themselves — left the hall and boarded the Dartmouth, a ship carrying tea, and dumped it overboard.
The optimists may have long been winning the peak oil media battle – as Matt Simmons observes – but we are beginning to see information coming out on the business pages that allows us to piece together a more balanced story. Right now, much of this focuses on everyone’s favourite cause for optimism, the oil sands…But do the facts support this rampant enthusiasm? I’d suggest not.
A few years ago I made a graph illustrating my view of the timing of future oil price shocks. I’ve updated that graph to reflect the current price, but I haven’t changed my mind about the timing of the next blow-up. Here it is.
We can only hope that last week’s edition of The Daly News finds its way into the monetary policy arena, but without the cartoon. Something is very wrong with an image of Herman Daly holding a money bag from which a tree is sprouting. The brainy proportioning of Herman is nicely done, but the relationship between the money bag and the tree is completely backwards.
As oil companies reported sharply increased profits this week, an estimated 5000 barrels of oil a day was spewing into the Gulf of Mexico following the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig. This ecological disaster comes just a month after President Obama gave the green light to expand drilling off the US coast, and while the timing of the disaster could hardly be worse for big oil’s PR…
The news from the Gulf of Mexico oil spill is not good. If the NOAA estimates are right about the size of the spill it could dwarf Exxon Valdez…
With BP’s Deepwater Horizon blowout in the news, the world’s interest is now focused on deepwater oil production. BP has another deepwater platform in the Gulf of Mexico—Thunder Horse—where it has been working some for some time. My analysis suggests production is not going well as planned at Thunder Horse.
Is global warming caused by too many people? This begins a series of articles in which Climate & Capitalism editor Ian Angus shows that population numbers can conceal far more than they reveal.
Here we go again. The tragic explosion on the Deepwater Horizon rig and subsequent oil spill has stirred up the usual offshore drilling debate in the United States. Apparently, the Halliburton people had just finished completing the well when something went terribly wrong. Such incidents are relatively rare, and it’s not known what the (over) reaction will be yet.
As part of his current book tour, author and climate activist Bill McKibben spoke at the First United Methodist Church in Boulder, CO on April 27, co-sponsored by Boulder Book Store and Transition Colorado. The video of his presentation is below, following the introduction that was given by Michael Brownlee, co-founder of Transition Colorado.
Nevada County locals Jim Wray and Loraine Webb demonstrate the how and why of packaging bulk foods with nitrogen. They’re using equipment available for community members to use at minimal cost. Jim demonstrates packaging: make plastic bags using a heat sealer, fill with foodstuffs, suck out the oxygen with a small vacuum, then replace the air with nitrogen and seal.
By now, most of you have probably heard about Arizona’s Senate Bill 1070, just signed into law by Governor Jan Brewer this past Friday. Surely this is an unjust law, by any definition. Martin Luther King, Jr., wrote, “A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law” (“Letter from Birmingham Jail”, par. 16).
