Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
“Transition towns, recycling, alternative power, enduring design; they are just attacking the symptoms. They are merely allowing us to continue living the way we are. They are buying us time. They are not embracing the root cause — our psychology.” Evolution and psychology explain our urge to consume, argues a new documentary film from the United Kingdom entitledConsumed — Inside the Belly of the Beast.
The heating of Earth remains the most urgent symptom of humanity’s mismanagement of our technological civilization. Desperately seeking answers for a low carbon energy regime, some observers propose a “nuclear renaissance” to replace hydrocarbons. Nuclear companies, nations, and advocates offer nuclear as a possible “low-carbon” energy path. However, the evidence in hand shows that nuclear energy is not the solution to humanity’s energy needs that many hope for. Here are the reasons…
Rebecca MacKinnon describes the expanding struggle for freedom and control in cyberspace, and asks: How do we design the next phase of the Internet with accountability and freedom at its core, rather than control?
The two big issues raised by the Murdoch furore are the plurality of our media and the quality of our journalism. Both these issues must be seen in their social, economic and cultural context.
KMO welcomes repeat guests Richard Heinberg and Dmitry Orlov back to the C-Realm Podcast to compare notes on the state of economic transition in which we find ourselves. In his new book, The End of Growth: Adapting to Our New Economic Reality, Richard makes the case that we have reached a crucial inflection point in economic history after which human progress and well-being must be de-coupled from economic growth. Dmitry describes a near-term future in which the United States has been dismantled by its creditors, whom he describes as trans-national mafias.
The world could soon be short of oil again, despite the worsening fiscal crisis, says the IEA. Although the turmoil in Europe threatened to engulf Italy – with the world’s third largest bond market – and the US budget standoff threatened its AAA credit rating, the Agency raised its 2012 oil demand growth forecast by 270,000 barrels/day.
Resource scarcity and climate change should be driving forward our transition to the energy systems of the future. Though this transition has started in important ways in several locations, change is not being undertaken at either the scale or speed required.
A new documentary, American Meat, is the first food documentary to really delve into how dependent our industrial food system is on fossil fuels. Using this vulnerability to help frame the discussion on the industrial versus the sustainable approach, director Graham Meriwether produces a film that helps make clear that in order to survive the decline in cheap energy, we need to ramp up our small scale sustainable farming efforts. He also focuses on the increasing profitability of such farms, and their ability to create more jobs.
We had a great few days at Hope University in Liverpool. This will not be an attempt at a complete document of that event, you will find the most comprehensive record over at the Transition Network’s conference feed. What I am going to share, with links to some of the key pieces of media from that feed, is some of the notes of my reflections at the end of the conference. As the event drew to a close, I went around and asked people for their brief reflections on what they saw as the character unique to this conference in comparison to others. Three words came up again and again, deepening, focus and maturity.
For years now, everyone thought that natural gas was cleaner than coal and more benevolent than oil. The blue flame just burned purely and wasn’t nearly as complicated or carboniferous as a lump of, well, bituminous coal…But shale gas, methane trapped in hellishly deep rock formations, has challenged this dated perception. In fact, the very stuff that energy experts champion as North America’s new energy wunderkind may be dirtier than coal, if not as extreme as Alberta’s dirty bitumen.
The news is no ordinary product, it is indelibly linked to the practice of democracy. When the product of news is broken, the practice of democracy suffers. The relationship between news and democracy works best when journalists are given the freedom (and resources) to do the job most journalists want to do — to scrutinize, to monitor, hold to account, interrogate power, to facilitate and maintain deliberation. But freedom in this context does not simply mean freedom from censorship and interference from government so frequently associated with the term ‘freedom of the press’; it also means freedom from the constraints and limitations of a thoroughly corporate culture. In neo-liberal democracies the power of the market is just as significant as the power of government.
During the past century, world economic growth has depended largely on ever-expanding use of hydrocarbon energy sources: oil for transportation, coal and natural gas for electricity generation, oil and gas for agricultural production. It is no exaggeration to say that the health of the global economy currently hinges on increasing rates of production of these fuels.
