Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
-U.S. Lethargy at Copenhagen Might Be Best for Climate
-Global warming is happening now
-Climate and Capitalism
-The Manufactured Doubt industry and the hacked email controversy
-Disagreeable truth about the coming Copenhagen charade
-Is global warming unstoppable?
-The Urgent Threat To World Peace Is … Canada
-Acknowledging the Reality of Peak Oil
-Peak Oil Reality – Production & Depletion Issues
-World Energy Outlook 2009 (Video)
-Can non-conventional oil fill the gap?
A serious dispute has broken out among economists about fiscal deficits in the United States. Paul Krugman has been making the rounds on the talk shows, arguing that more stimulus spending is required to spur job creation…Jim Hamilton, whose work on oil price shocks has made him a familiar figure to those concerned about liquid fuels, is worried about the debt load the government is accumulating.
A midweek roundup of peak oil news, including:
-Prices and production
-Iran
In October 2008, Deconstructing Dinner had the pleasure of spending time on Cortes Island, British Columbia with a group of young enthusiastic adults who had just spent 8 months learning the intricacies of growing food using organic and permaculture principles…On this episode we meet those students and instructors to learn more about this unique programme, its impacts on the students, and perhaps for us as listeners, can act as inspiration to develop similar programmes in our own communities.
With a long-time eye to declining energy resources, Bart Anderson envisions a very different society in five years. The former editor of Energy Bulletin.net offers advice for post-oil living: Understand the problem. Prepare psychologically for big shifts and the unexpected. Find your niche and get good at it. See what your great grandparents did as a model for living well within limits. “Live poor and learn to do it well” as Bart did as a graduate student. Things will be very different, he said, but we’ll make it through.
Plenty of difficulties stand in the way of making sense of the economic realities we face at the end of the age of cheap abundant energy…Our methods of producing goods and services are orders of magnitude more complex than those of previous civilizations, for example, and our economy relies on treating borrowing as wealth to an extent no other society has been harebrained enough to try before; these and other differences make the task of tracing the economic dimensions of the long road of decline and fall ahead of us unavoidably more difficult than they otherwise would be.
I’ve gottten literally dozens of emails begging me to weigh in on the East Anglia climate scandal, and for a while, I was reluctant to do so, because ultimately, paying attention to something so inane just gives it credibility. We’re back, again, to the old battles over climate change — attention to trivialities in the absence of the central issue.
Most of us have heard that Dubai World is asking for a six month delay in paying back its debt. The debt was supposedly backed by the Dubai government, so Standard & Poor’s considers this a default of the Dubai government.
With the revelations that key climate change emails were disclosed to be promoting a definite-climate-change public message, with the Hadley Climate Centre taking a hit, and raw climate data used in conclusions having been trashed, there has been fodder for activists and lobbyists opposing meaningful cuts in greenhouse gas emissions. And it all happens to come right before the Copenhagen climate change conference.
A few people have been in touch to ask whether, in the light of the recent illegal hacking into UEA’s emails, and the proposition by climate deniers that some of the emails that have emerged prove climate change is a scam, Transition Network now intends to renounce the absurd notion of human-induced climate change. Of course not.
New research from the Soil Association reveals that if all UK farmland was converted to organic farming, at least 3.2 million tonnes of carbon would be taken up by the soil each year – the equivalent of taking nearly 1 million cars off the road.
