Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Worried about high oil prices and exploding nuclear plants? Carry on shoppers, because we’ve found gold right under our feet – a bonanza of natural gas. Yes, fracking will fill your tank, heat your house, and light up the streets for another 100 years. At least that’s what we’ve been told. A new report out from the Post Carbon Institute pokes a sharp pin in the natural gas bubble. We’ll hear from energy analyst David Hughes.
The implications of the Hughes report are disturbing. Without dramatic reductions in consumption of fossil fuels from outright conservation to energy efficiency (he strongly recommends more co-generation and targeting fuels to their highest-value applications), the rapid exploitation of shale gas will only confirm Eric Sevareid’s law: “the chief cause of problems are solutions.”
Roughly one third of the food produced in the world for human consumption every year — approximately 1.3 billion tonnes — gets lost or wasted, according to an FAO-commissioned study.
The steady stream of scandals, outbreaks of disease and regulatory crack-downs that is part and parcel of the industrial food system has made food safety a major global issue. Our growing reliance on corporate food and farming concentrates and amplifies risk in new and unprecedented ways, at scales never seen before, making intervention more necessary than ever to ensure that food does not make people sick. But behind all of the talk and action lies another agenda.
The left I want is a complicated one: it’s a left which wants to put empowerment first, and that means helping people–as I must always remind myself as well–grasp the limits, the particularity, within which such empowerment is possible. That’s a hard left to maintain, and who knows? Perhaps it’s an imaginary one.
All of economics is divided into two schools: steady state theory and infinite planet theory. They can’t both be right. You’d think the choice between them would be obvious, but infinite planet theory still holds sway in classrooms and in the halls of power where policy is made. Last month, though, brought a significant development: the manager of a major hedge fund registered a carefully reasoned dissent from infinite planet theory. And in doing so, Jeremy Grantham offered a glimpse of how and why steady state economic theory will ultimately come to prevail.
At the most basic level, climate changes that cause world surface temperatures to rise are rooted in increased fossil emissions in the atmosphere. Total fossil fuel emissions are a function of key variables, most notably population, per-capita gross domestic product (GDP) and the carbon intensity of an individual unit of GDP. Understanding these forces and their relationships with each other is critical to measuring the extent of climate change and how we may seek to deal with it.
Would vested interests be so crazy as to persist in their manipulations of public perception and policy when faced with compelling evidence that suggests their actions could result in widespread starvation? Apparently the answer is yes.
Oil demand appears to finally be responding to high oil prices, most significantly in the US where petrol prices have hit $4/gallon. The IEA cut its 2011 demand forecast by 190,000 barrels/day on news of increased US stockpiles and reduced consumption, and prices dropped back from recent highs to around $110/barrel for Brent…
This will be “the greenest government ever” said David Cameron exactly a year ago. The bar set by the previous Labour government was low. Incredibly, even with the supposedly eco-friendly Liberal Democrats in government, it looks like this coalition will go under that bar.
“The most important conclusion of this paper is that the peak of global coal production from the existing coalfields is imminent, and coal production from these areas will fall by 50% in the next 40 years. The CO2 emissions from burning this coal will also decline by 50%. Thus, current focus on carbon capture and geological sequestration may be misplaced. Instead, the global community should be devoting its attention to conservation and increasing efficiency of electrical power generation from coal.”
How can education, at all levels, best contribute to the Transition process, building resilient individuals, resilient communities and resilient institutions?
