Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
-Outer Ring Suburbs and the Permanent Foreclosure
-Designing Cities for People: Farming in the City
-Cleveland’s Comeback
-The secret mall gardens of Cleveland
-10 Land-Use Strategies to Create Socially Just, Multiracial Cities
The United States Joint Forces Command regularly (about every two years) issues its “perspective on future trends, shocks, contexts and implications for… the national security field.”…Amid the multitude of security threats, energy has moved rapidly to the forefront, and it is the oil supply issue which is the focus of this review.
I just finished reading a book called Anatomy of the Bear where the point was made that rising new car sales are a leading indicator for the end of recession. No wonder then that many OECD governments introduced incentive schemes to boost new car sales following the dive off the cliff that accompanied the credit crunch (Figure 1). Cash for clunkers in the USA was called the Scrappage Scheme in the UK. No prizes for spotting when the credit crunch recession began in the UK. But what will happen now that the scheme is due to end shortly?
A year ago, my business partner, Caitlyn Galloway, and I started Little City Gardens. We grow salad greens, braising greens, and culinary herbs in the heart of San Francisco, which we sell to a restaurant, caterers, and individual subscribers. Little City Gardens is a lot of things: a market-garden, a small business struggling to succeed, and an experiment in the viability of urban micro-farming. We started the business with a desire to apply ourselves to the redesign of our local foodshed.
Driving down the broad avenues of Cleveland, Ohio, was like flipping through the pages of a picture book about the rise and fall of our industrial empire. Where demolitions had not removed things — a lot was gone — stood the residue of a society so different from ours that you felt momentarily transported to another planet where a different race of beings had gone about their business.
David Orr was in the UK recently, and the two of us were part of a panel at an event organised by the Prince’s Foundation for the Built Environment. After the event, we retired to the bar of a rather grand London hotel, and chatted for an hour about energy, climate change, the Precautionary Principle, Transition and whether or not we are beyond talk of ’solutions’.
I often read John Michael Greer, the Archdruid. He’s a smart and thoughtful guy who worries about some of the same things I worry about, though he tends to have decided they are all hopeless, whereas I tend to see society as having a lot more options than he perceives. He has read very widely and often comes up with interesting historical analogies that hadn’t occurred to me, so he’s well worth the spot in my reader.
-World oil demand’s shift toward faster growing and less price-responsive products and regions
-Economists deliver a sturdy smackdown of peak oil demand
-Study Finds that Peak Oil Demand is Decades Away, but Minimizes Effects of Rising Consumer Product Prices
-Forecasts underestimate oil demand, study says
-Moody’s Says U.S. Debt Could Test Triple-A Rating
-Europe and America Wrestle over Tighter Financial Regulation
-Gazing Through The Long Tall Grass
-Berlin and Paris Take Aim at Speculators
-Finance Superstars Talk About the Massive Fraud in Our Economic System
-Detroit Wants To Save Itself – By Shrinking
-Orange officials sue couple who removed their lawn
-Obama’s Nuclear Blind Spot
-Tory budget ‘walks away’ from renewable energy, environmentalist says
-The Case Against Biofuels: Probing Ethanol’s Hidden Costs
-Big Oil Behind Yet Another Biofuels Research Paper
-Harrabin’s Notes: Battle over biofuel strategy
People grasp what their drinking water has to do with them. Overwhelmingly, I think they do not fully grasp what global warming has to do with them – and that’s a rhetorical failure…At the same time that highly effective movements are arranging million person demonstrations in the streets, most of the people who will actually tell their congressfolk whether to vote for change were watching Law and Order SVU.
