Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Everyone should listen to this BBC report on the “price of biofuels.” It digs into a key question: what does Europe’s appetite for biodiesel mean for people and ecosystems in the countries that produce the feedstocks?
-Giant gravel batteries could make renewable energy more reliable
-Regulators Approve First Offshore Wind Farm in U.S.
-Colorado Shows How It’s Done
-Windmill Boom Curbs Electric Power Prices for RWE
-Peak at the polls
-Saudi Arabia global oil exports to wane post-2010
-Drilling and spilling for all the oil that’s left
-Gulf oil spill ‘five times’ larger than estimated
-Flight disruptions in Europe a Foretaste for Period of Oil Decline
-The Imminent Crash Of Oil Supply: Be Afraid
-Peak oil predictions
Financial reform is the Congressional political issue of the month. Democrats say their bill will place essential controls on Wall Street to prevent abuse and a repeat of the financial crash. Republicans say it will encourage further Wall Street risk-taking by giving the big banks a guarantee of a future taxpayer bailout if reckless decisions trigger another financial crash.
-Mainstream Green Groups Cave In on Climate
-Reclaiming Earth Day: With Climate Chaos on the Horizon, the Environmental Movement Needs Traction
-A New Climate Movement in Bolivia
-Earth Day™ — Tastes Great, Less Filling
-The Open Veins of Climate Change
Tom Barefoot and Linda Wheatley explain the idea behind an upcoming conference in Vermont on how governments can measure the success of their policies using gross national happiness, not gross national product. And Ben Hewitt, author of the book about Hardwick called The Town That Food Saved, tells what he learned from the people of Hardwick about the difference between economic prosperity and quality of life.
A brief analysis of social networking in a time of crisis, the bourgeoisie luxury of flight, and why disregarding Arctic wildlife will save Arctic wildlife.
Philosopher-farmers Wendell Berry, Wes Jackson and Gene Logsdon discuss the future of agriculture, the environment and changing our ideas about growth and progress.
Hollywood images of the future tend to be pretty grim: most video stores even have a single section now entitled “science fiction / horror,” since any future they show is likely to be horrifying. Just the last few years have given us The Book of Eli, The Road, 2012, I Am Legend, Children of Men, 28 Weeks Later, Resident Evil, Terminator films and series, and even WALL-E, the first post-apocalypse children’s movie.
2010 might very well be seen in retrospect as the year when Peak Oil became, if not exactly mainstream, at least something of a subject for the powers that be…Yet very little of it transpired into mainstream press and we can be quite sure, as Matthieu Auzanneau himself acknowledges, that a lot of water will run under the bridges of Paris before any kind of policy is implemented to address the problem. And there are unfortunately very good reasons for that.
Communal life – our tribal past – valued the group over the individual. We left our communal past to put the individual’s benefit (and especially material benefit) before the common good, in the process losing much of our memory of community.
Community may suffer from overuse more sorely than any word in the dictionary. Politicians left and right sprinkle it through their remarks the way a bad Chinese restaurant uses MSG, to mask the lack of wholesome ingredients. But we need to rescue it; we need to make sure that community will become, on this tougher planet, one of the most prosaic terms in the lexicon, like hoe or bicycle or computers. Access to endless amounts of cheap energy made us rich, and wrecked our climate, and it also made us the first people on earth who had no practical need of our neighbors.
