Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Margaret Atwood’s The Year of the Flood is a master work of environmental awareness. It would behoove all those who are searching for ways to reach the broader public about these important issues to read this remarkable work.
– The Depression: If Only Things Were That Good
– Adjusting the economy to the new energy realities of the second half of the age of oil
– The Ecology of Marxian Political Economy
Both the IEA and OPEC cut their oil demand forecasts this week for 2011 and 2012 on the worsening economic outlook…
The price of gas and oil fluctuates daily and many don’t understand why, or what is contributing to the constant flux in price or where the money goes. This infographic illustrates the “Facts about Fuel Prices” to help shed light on fuel cost factors.
A midweekly roundup of peak oil news, including:
-Developments this week
-The oil market report
With every passing day it is becoming more apparent that the crisis of the depletion of cheap oil has become deeply enmeshed in the European debt crises. … Concern over the course of the Greek debt crisis has been roiling the foreign exchange and equity markets of late taking oil prices along for a rather wild ride. Last week we had London oil below $100 a barrel, but renewed optimism, or as it is now known, “risk appetite,” soon sent London oil back up over $111 where it continues to methodically eat the heart out of the OECD economies. London oil has now been above $100 a barrel for the last nine months and so far shows no signs of collapsing to the fabled $60 a barrel level as it did three years ago.
The September 2011 issue of the American Journal of Public Health offers several papers on peak oil. Ten years ago this special issue would have been revolutionary; five years ago it would have been an urgent warning. Its appearance in 2011, however, leaves this participant/observer disappointed.
We’ve just seen how the economy could be put on the right track. But sorting out the economy is not enough to save the world; that would be just the first step.
Daniel Yergin has succeeded as a historian of energy, but failed as envisioner of a tolerable future.
Nicole Foss is senior editor of The Automatic Earth web site, and an international speaker integrating topics of peak oil, economics and personal preparation. In 2001, Foss moved her family from England to rural Ontario, in order to prepare her family for peak oil and economic uncertainty. Local Future nonprofit has published to YouTube the entire 40-minute presentation by Foss on her considerations for personal preparation, in advance of her keynote presentation at the International Conference on Sustainability, Transition and Culture Change: Vision, Action, Leadership.
The world is doomed to repeat four-year cycles of booms followed by crashes if we don’t get off oil, Jeremy Rifkin warned a Climate One audience in San Francisco on October 3. The solution, what he calls the Third Industrial Revolution, is the “Energy Internet,” a nervous system linking millions of small renewable energy producers.
Increasingly, those of us who were ready to move with President Obama four years ago are deciding to leave normal channels and find new forms of action. Here’s an example: by year’s end the president has said he will make a decision on the Keystone XL pipeline, which would carry crude oil from the tar sands of northern Alberta to the Gulf of Mexico.
The nation’s top climate scientists sent the administration a letter indicating that such a development would be disastrous for the climate. … But every indication from this administration suggests that it is prepared to grant the necessary permission for a project that has the enthusiastic backing of the Chamber of Commerce, and in which the Koch Brothers have a “direct and substantial interest.”
