Media & Communications

Comments on Scientific American’s “Squeezing more oil from the ground”

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A decade ago, Scientific American published the seminal article by these two luminaries of the Peak Oil awareness movement, that relaunched the debate on M. King Hubbert’s finds, Scientific American appears now as a completely different publication. Now, however, scientific content doesn’t seem to be a requisite for its articles. Among other eerie details, Leonardo Maugeri goes as far as citing “Common Wisdom” to present erroneous facts.

US and fossil fuels – friend or foe? – Oct 20

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-Fossil Fuels’ Hidden Cost Is in Billions, Study Says
-Will EPA veto or regulate the plunder of Appalachia?
-Global Warming Accelerating While The U.S. Backpedals

Equal Time with Carl Etnier: Rural Vermont’s New Directions, Plus Produce: The New Urban Agriculture

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Brian Moyer, the new executive director of Rural Vermont, explains how the organization plans to follow up on their legislative successes by making sure the laws about raw milk, on-farm slaughter, and other aspects of farming are working as intended and helping family farmers. City planner and designer Darrin Nordahl says cities, towns, and villages should not only let people grow food in the margins of urban areas, they should pay their staff to grow food on public land. Nordahl talks about his new book, Public Produce: The New Urban Agriculture.

The Ecotechnic Future (book excerpt)

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…A technic society, by contrast, relies primarily on nonfood energy. Modern industrial civilization is simply a form of technic society that gets its nonfood energy from fossil fuels and maximizes production of goods and services in the usual R-selected way at the cost of vast inefficiency. At the other end of the spectrum is the climax community, the ecotechnic society, which gets its nonfood energy from renewable sources and maximizes the efficiency of its energy and resource use in the usual K-selected way at the cost of more restricted access to goods and services.

The Oceans are Coming

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September 2009 the latest global temperature rise projections released by the Hadley Centre, part of the British Meteorological Office indicated an average rise of 4 degrees Celsius (that’s a balmy 7.2°F) by 2055 given a business as usual scenario. Some places will be a bit more stable, but the places that particularly matter – the ice caps, the methane-rich permafrosts in northern Canada and Siberia, and the Amazon rainforest – will be melting, off-gassing, and burning, respectively.

Economics – Oct 19

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-A tale of how it turned out right
-Investor alarm as Finance Minister blasts corporate Japan’s ethics
-Memo to Investigators: Dig Deep
-A year after the crunch, it’s boom time again for bankers
-Public Health Before Wall Street Wealth
-Stiglitz and Sen’s Manifesto on Measuring Economic Performance and Social Progress
-The sound of one bank not banking