Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
The Occupy movement has been an extremely exciting development. Unprecedented, in fact. There’s never been anything like it that I can think of. If the bonds and associations it has established can be sustained through a long, dark period ahead — because victory won’t come quickly — it could prove a significant moment in American history.
Ernest “Chick” Callenbach, a film scholar and environmentalist who created a cult favorite in “Ecotopia,” a 1975 novel that predicted with uncanny accuracy a world where recycling is commonplace, food is locally grown and energy comes from the sun, died April 16 in Berkeley. The novel has now sold nearly one million copies and been translated into a dozen languages
– IMF working paper – “The Future of Oil: Geology versus Technology”
– World Oil: Aleklett’s new analysis of peak oil is refreshingly comprehensive
– Now Playing at a Computer Near You: The ASPO-USA Webinar Series
– T. Boone Pickens: Biggest Deterrent To U.S. Energy Plan Is Koch Industries
– Cheap Oil Built ‘The American Way’ but All the Cheap Oil is Gone
Faced with increasing political obstacles to oil and natural gas exploration in many countries around the world, the oil industry is focusing again on the United States. The industry is using the deceitful promise of energy independence to cajole Americans and their policymakers into relaxing environmental regulations and opening protected public lands and restricted offshore areas to drilling.
The last thirty years has seen the re-emergence of a civil economic challenge, side by side with the advance of globalisation, as a distinct strand in the development of global civil society. Don’t underestimate its longterm significance in the glacial shifts now taking place in the world economy.
Peak oil is a fact, not a theory. From US conventional oil production peaking in 1970 to global conventional oil production peaking in 2006 the figures are indisputable. Even institutions such as the International Energy Agency (IEA) and publications like The Economist that are not known for alarmism have admitted that oil production from conventional sources has peaked.
So why are there still commentators who refuse to believe peak oil?
The linking of development policy, pursuit of wellbeing, and alternative indicators in a new economic paradigm is a strong step toward establishing a sane and sustainable civilization that focuses on meeting human needs with ecological efficiency. To get there, centuries of infinite-planet economic thinking have to be swept aside. Traditional development theory begins with the idea that some nations are underdeveloped — nations that don’t have a western, industrial, consumerist economy. It also supposes that all the nations of the world want that kind of economy and that they can have it. But all three presumptions are false.
New data released last month by researchers at Yale and George Mason universities show that a lot of Americans are growing far more concerned about climate change, precisely because they’re drawing the links between freaky weather, a climate kicked off-kilter by a fossil-fuel guzzling civilization, and their own lives. After a year with a record number of multi-billion dollar weather disasters, seven in ten Americans now believe that “global warming is affecting the weather.”
A new study has raised fresh concerns about the safety of gas drilling in the Marcellus Shale, concluding that fracking chemicals injected into the ground could migrate toward drinking water supplies far more quickly than experts have previously predicted.
Food is a source of joy and comfort but how we produce it is crucial to our collective survival. Lolo Houbein is a South Australian food security advocate and writer.
Understanding the nature of our energy basis is critical to understanding where we are headed as a civilization. Unless people have received unusual education to break their conditioning to expect and desire growth, most people are so schooled and immersed in the growth story that they do not realize that there may be other possible futures, especially in the US where growth has been so consistent and rapid. In this period of global resource transition, peoples’ beliefs are separating into a growth continuum of three general belief systems or world views that inform our lives and trace a trajectory for our future.
Recently Ugo Bardi raised the matter of methane and the fact that compared with geological history, the present level in the atmosphere of this potent “greenhouse-gas” is exceptionally high. We see methane bubbling from the arctic margins. We know the present level is around 1800 parts per billion (1.8ppm); more than 2.5-fold the pre-industrial level. We know this rise has been sudden and that most of it occurred in the 20thC up to about year 1990, and that interestingly for a rapidly oxidised molecule, this high level has been sustained, and lately has begun to increase again. After a brief discussion with Ugo, I decided to attempt an update of my own knowledge.
