Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
In a finding that may speed efforts to conserve oil and intensify the search for alternative fuel sources, scientists in Kuwait predict that world conventional crude oil production will peak in 2014 — almost a decade earlier than some other predictions. Their study is in ACS’ Energy & Fuels, a bi-monthly journal.
Around the world civilian rights to food and water are being eroded by the patenting of life forms and by privatization of water systems. Some farmers have been hit with law suits for patent infringement, while they were planting heritage seeds. The outspoken, multi-talented Vandana Shiva, joins us to talk about these and other issues of capitalist globalization. She is a celebrated ecofeminist, grassroots activist, research physicist, author, and international advocate for alternatives to global corporate hegemony.
Rolfe Winkler wrote some good stuff in the wake of the Make Markets Be Markets conference held in the Imperial capital last week. I’ll get to that in a moment. The purpose of the get together, which was hosted by the Roosevelt Institute, was to push for much needed financial reform. Many of the usual suspects were there, including Simon Johnson and Elizabeth Warren. Rob Johnson, Senior Fellow and Director of the Project on Global Finance at The Roosevelt Institute, wrote the introduction to the conference report (big pdf).
The piece builds on Lynas’s previous much publicised conversion to nuclear power, arguing that if we are to apply the scientific rigour that underpins climate science to all other areas of life, in the same way that nuclear power is supported by the science, so is GM. While I strongly disagree with him on both, I want here to challenge Lynas’s conversion to GM, and the belief that if we are serious about climate change, we have no option other than to embrace GM.
As signs of climate instability increase, radical and rapid action is becoming ever more urgent…Yet even within the environmental movement there is no unanimity on this thorny question: should the countries of the South have the right to increase their emissions as they industrialize and “develop”?
It’s almost too easy to vilify corporations. What, with all the evil stuff they do. Take the coal industry for example, who blow up our mountains, poison our air and water, contribute massively to global climate change, and spend untold millionsof dollars on disinformation campaigns, lobbying Congress, buying Senators, and lying to block efforts to tackle the climate crisis. I mean, they are practically begging for our hatred, right? Right.
Peak Shrink has an interesting post on The Tyranny of Positive Thinking, a review of Barbara Ehrenreich’s book Bright-sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America. In it, she expresses the same frustration I’ve felt when dealing with our cult of positivity.
Should climate activists and feminists support campaigns to slow population growth? Laurie Mazur says that alliance will strengthen the movement. Ian Angus strongly disagrees …
-Public safety means more than just cops
-Dominican Authorities Approve Container Cities For Haiti Housing Relief
-Detroit homes sell for $1 amid mortgage and car industry crisis
-Digital designer shows what future towns could look like
-A March Round-up of What’s Happening out in the World of Transition
-Transition on ‘One Planet’ on BBC World Service
-Transition Sunshine Coast delivers EDAP
-“Genuine resilience results from expanding the human footprint”. Discuss
A popular idea at the moment to address climate change is biochar – essentially taking organic materials, charring them, and burying them in the soil…Now, the biofuel story has given me a bit of a horror of ideas that sound cool to environmentalists, are fine on a small scale, but are a disaster when scaled up by industrial society. So I wanted to do a few quick back-of-the-envelope calculations of the limits of this approach.
On Friday, journalist John Fleck made a great point, comparing coverage of two new pieces in Science. One is about the latest potential climate disaster: methane venting from the seafloor in the Arctic. The second is about a promising new climate solution: using behavioral science to influence energy use. Not surprisingly, the disaster got tons of coverage. The solution got none. This is entirely typical. As Fleck says, “The problem space gets more attention than the solution space.”
