Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
KMO welcomes Albert K. Bates back to the program to talk about the themes of his forthcoming book, The Biochar Solution. Could a form of homebrewed carbon sequestration provide a stopgap measure that could buy us time to implement effective atmospheric remediation? Should biochar be considered a form of geo-engineering? How do we prevent carbon credits from becoming the new credit default swaps? All this and music by Zarathrutra.
Could it be that “thinking positively” is contributing to our blindness and inaction around energy issues, environmental degradation and economic devastation? I’ve hammered this point home in a number of posts, the most widely read being “Do You Have a Panglossian Disorder?.” Now, a trenchant social observer provides a clear outline of how that may well be so, elaborating on the ‘dangers of positive thinking.’
The Haradh III development at the southern tip of the Ghawar oil field in Saudi Arabia, completed in 2006, has been portrayed by the national oil company Saudi Aramco as the turning point in the battle between geological adversity and engineering prowess…Aided by 3D Seismic images showing fracture locations, well sites were optimized and drills were guided by remote control from Dhahran….Lots of glowing articles were published, and the man in charge eventually rode off in glory to solve the rest of the world’s oil production problems.
Salon’s Andrew Leonard has just published Bringing subprime sexy back, a review of Michael Lewis’ much anticipated book The Big Short, a follow-up to his wonderful Liar’s Poker. Before I get started here, let me say that I think Michael Lewis is great—I have quoted him here at DOTE—and I’m usually OK with Andrew Leonard too.
We live in a world of deep inequality, and the gap between the rich and the poor is widening. We in the rich world generally agree that this is a problem we ought to help fix—but that the real beneficiaries will be the billions of people living in poverty. After all, inequality has little impact on the lives of those who find themselves on top of the pile. Right?
The cattle breeds from the past will be the breeds preferred tomorrow.
A lot of what I write works from the assumption that we all agree that peak oil and climate change are happening and going to be life-changing events. And yet, some people who read this blog don’t necessarily agree on this subject, or they don’t see the effects has being as profound as I do, or perhaps the idea of peak oil or climate change is fairly new to them, and they don’t know what to believe.
Farmers are invisible people, and middle-class city dwellers choose to pretend that the long lines of trucks bringing food into the city at dawn every day have nothing to do with the white-collar world. Perhaps it is a mark of the civilized person to believe that the essentials of food, clothing, and shelter have no relevance to daily life. Yet if the farmers stopped sending food into the great vacuum of the metropolis, the great maw of urbanity, the city would soon start to crumble, as Britain discovered in the year 2000 [5]. The next question, then, is: Where does all this food come from?
Two Brits are duking it out over the fate of the United States. Harvard historian Niall Ferguson, a Scot who believes that America’s Imperial Magnificence is fading fast, fired the opening salvo in A Greek Crisis Is Coming To America…Financial Times editor Martin Wolf weighed in to counter what he calls Ferguson’s “hysteria” in How to walk the fiscal tightrope that lies before us.
-Environmentalists question coal’s place in Obama policy
-The Dirty Truth Behind Clean Coal
-Parsing fact from fiction with the Bloom Energy box
The United States apparently has reached the point where it must either accept that Iran will develop nuclear weapons at some point if it wishes, or take military action to prevent this. There is a third strategy, however: Washington can seek to redefine the Iranian question. As we have no idea what leaders on either side are thinking, exploring this represents an exercise in geopolitical theory. Let’s begin with the two apparent stark choices.
Probably many of the scenarios presented in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) most recent reports on the natural and social impacts of global warming will take place not in the year 2100 or even 2050…Therefore, it is critically urgent to adopt policies which truly address the environmental problems we face. Environmental education is a vital part of this call to action. As an intellectual mechanism, environmental education serves both as a means of persuasion and a way to bring about behavioral change.
