Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
There are signs that more GDP growth may not be in the cards, regardless whose economic remedy is chosen. In fact, the day may have arrived when GDP itself has outlived whatever usefulness it ever had…If the “recovery” was all smoke and mirrors, we’ve just run out of mirrors.
Standard & Poor’s announced Friday it has downgraded the U.S. credit rating for the first time in history. The move by S&P, one of three leading credit rating agencies, came just days after Congress approved a $2.1 trillion deficit-reduction plan. “In some ways, that is in another world from most Americans and their day-to-day struggles. What is it going to mean to you if you have no job now?” says our guest, Barbara Ehrenreich, who has just published the 10th anniversary edition of her book “Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America.” In the book, Ehrenreich tells the story of life in low-wage America and tries to earn a living working as a waitress, hotel maid, nursing home aide and Wal-Mart associate. Ten years later, she compares the current situation of low-income U.S. workers to “third-world levels of poverty.”
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.
I have been advising anyone who would listen to voluntarily cut back on their consumption, based on the premise that we were probably headed, in a post-Peak Oil environment, for a prolonged period of deflation in the auto/housing/finance sectors and inflation in food and energy prices.
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.
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”.
A society that is based on a multiplicity of interconnected communities and places will appear as a large ecology of people, animals, plants, places and products.
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.
It’s been over 13 months since we shopped in a large, intense, brightly lit, empire of grocery consumerism and I’m happy to report that life sans supermarket is not only viable but quite wonderful! With no intention of going back, I hope you will consider quitting too!
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.
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.
-How a community farm for London could end ‘madness of flying and shipping in food’
-The truth about the global demand for food
-The Permaculture Movement Grows From Underground
-Cooking with California Food in K-12 Schools
-British farmers forced to pay the cost of supermarket price wars
