Media & Communications

Join the Austerity Party & Vermont enables towns to finance home efficiency, renewables

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Frequent guest Sharon Astyk declared a “riot for austerity” in 2007, which isn’t a riot at all. She led people from around the world in a voluntary effort to reduce their resource use by 90%. She is now starting up the “riot” again, and she invites you to join her in saving resources, saving money, and–perhaps surprisingly–having fun.

Peter Adamczyk, Energy Finance and Development Manager at Vermont Energy Investment Corporation (VEIC) talks about how the state’s newly revised PACE program can help towns help their home owners save money through energy efficiency and renewables.

Canadian Government: Greenhouse gas emissions from tar sands may double by 2020

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A newly-released report from the Canadian government reinforces the looming environmental impact of tar sands oil: As producers ramp up their activity, due in large part from a projected increase in demand from U.S. refineries, greenhouse gas emissions from Alberta’s tar sands could double by 2020 compared to 2010 levels.

President Obama’s (hoped for) “Amaze Speech”

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Fellow Americans, this evening I have a special message for you. It’s an unprecedented and surprising message, but ultimately it will resonate with your common sense, good will, and patriotic spirit. It turns out that the recessionary cloud we’re under does have an extremely valuable silver lining. I know; it sounds like something only a politician would say, but wait. I think you’ll be surprised to hear my explanation.

What could a post-growth society look like and how should we prepare for it?

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It seems obvious to say that common ways of thinking about growth and development among the population of the industrial countries assumes that peoples in poor countries would want to develop along a similar path to what has happened in the industrial world – for this is the direction of “progress” and reason. That is, after all, why they are called “developing countries”. However, for indigenous peoples “development” and growth has actually been a long history of colonial exploitation, suffering, racism, the oppression of women, not to mention the destruction of “Mother Earth”.

U.S. shale gas: Less abundance, higher cost

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Shale gas has become an important and permanent feature of U.S. energy supply. Daily production has increased from less than 1 billion cubic feet of gas per day (bcfd) in 2003, when the first modern horizontal drilling and fracture stimulation was used, to almost 20 bcfd by mid-2011. There are, however, two major concerns at the center of the shale gas revolution. Despite impressive production growth, it is not yet clear that these plays are commercial at current prices because of the high capital costs of land and drilling and completion. Reserves and economics depend on estimated ultimate recoveries based on hyperbolic, or increasingly flattening, decline profiles that predict decades of commercial production. With only a few years of production history in most of these plays, this model has not been shown to be correct, and may be overly optimistic.

Why you can’t fight climate change without peak oil

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Clive Hamilton has been researching energy and its problems for years. But judging by his book on why the world’s governments have failed to slow industrial society’s slide towards climate disaster, Hamilton is either willfully ignorant of peak oil, or too scared to talk about it. But like too many people who care about climate change, he’s only getting half the story — and helping to handicap the climate movement in the process.

Models for a movement

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The new book GWR: The Global Warming Reader leaves a reader wondering why, given the evidence, there’s not a robust movement to replace the causes of the warming. But the situation is unlike any other that’s arisen, and our historical models of resistance or mobilization may mislead us. Many of these differences are painfully apparent to those trying to build a movement; in the aggregate they are daunting and suggest the need for some additional tactics, including a kind of initiation.