Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Peak Oil and Climate Change are two historic events for humans and life on earth. The first threatens modern industrial ways of living and the latter threatens the climatic systems that are an integral part of our world and the way we live and survive.
Contemplating the end of oil is frightening, even terrifying. …But since it is Thanksgiving, let’s take a clear-eyed look at our situation and see if there is anything that we can be thankful for.
Environmentalist Bill McKibben on global warming /
Long-term model shows 14.5-degree hike in temperature /
Animal response to climate change may backfire /
EU seeks talks, not targets at U.N. climate meeting /
Canada: dramatic weather changes due to human activity, climate change /
China’s water crisis worst in the world: government official /
Expanding desert could cover China’s breadbasket with sand /
Environmental cloud on horizon for Mediterranean, warns UN
Second part of The Ecologist series on Peak Oil detailing the impacts on food production in the UK. Note that this version is published on the American International Automobile Dealers Assoc. website!!
Speeches and reports from the Petrocollapse conference held in NYC Oct 5: Ruppert, Kunstler, Darnell, Lundberg.
…it would appear that we may be underestimating the breadth of biologic responses to changes in climate. Treating climate-related ills will require preparation, and early-warning systems forecasting extreme weather can help to reduce casualties and curtail the spread of disease. But primary prevention would require halting the extraction, mining, transport, refining, and combustion of fossil fuels — a transformation that many experts believe would have innumerable health and environmental benefits and would help to stabilize the climate.
…a global ecological revolution worthy of the name can only occur as part of a larger social—and I would insist, socialist—revolution. Such a revolution, were it to generate the conditions of equality, sustainability, and human freedom worthy of a genuine Great Transition, would necessarily draw its major impetus from the struggles of working populations and communities at the bottom of the global capitalist hierarchy…
Speakers include James Howard Kunstler, John Darnell, Ph.D., David Pimentel, Ph.D., Michael Ruppert, Andrew McKillop, David Room, Catherine Austin Fitts, Pincas Jawetz, Jenna Orkin, and Jan Lundberg.
While the pundits analyze the fossil fuel subsidies and nuclear industry giveaways in the energy bill only just signed by President Bush, they miss the overall. From the standpoint of ecology, the primary strategy behind the bill is a simple one: Increase the rate of drawdown in order to shore up a world economic and social system that is suffering gravely from the effects of a global environmental meltdown.
From farm to plate, the modern food system relies heavily on cheap oil. Threats to our oil supply are also threats to our food supply. As food undergoes more processing and travels farther, the food system consumes ever more energy each year.
We are already living on an overloaded world. Our future will be a product of that fact; that fact is a product of our past. Our first order of business, then, is to make clear to ourselves how we got where we are and why our present situation entails a certain kind of future. [Chapter 2 from William Catton’s classic book Overshoot]
More than 16 per cent of the European Union’s land is affected by soil degradation, but in the accession countries more than a third is affected, according to the first Soil Atlas of Europe, published last week.
