Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
-Brent Oil Falls Below $100 A Barrel For First Time Since October
-Greece Finding Crude Oil Increasingly Hard to Come By
-Dr. Colin J. Campbell discusses changes in world energy supplies [video]
-Was tun, wenn das Öl versiegt? [audio]
Since its beginnings, the sleeper-awakes scenario has been one of the most commonly used frameworks for introducing fictional utopias and dystopias–yet somehow it doesn’t feel overdone. The reason, I suspect, is that the sleep is incidental to the story, the true focus being the new world order and how it compares with the old. That’s certainly the case with Patricia Frank’s Falling Through Time, the story of a woman who travels into the future and takes us on a sort of guided tour of it. Her name is Summer Holbrook, and she’s a prominent advertising executive who goes missing while vacationing in Alaska. After suffering a spill down a glacier crevasse, she freezes, falls into suspended animation and is found and rescued by a band of expeditioners in the year 2084.
As I explored the ruins of the Hohokam on a recent trip to central Arizona, one question kept popping into my mind: will modern Phoenix thrive as long as the Hohokam did in these desert environs?
-Spread Reckoning: U.S. Suburbs Face Twin Perils of Climate Change and Peak Oil
-Sprawling cities pressure environment, planning
-Climate Change Threatens the Poor in Cities
-Rampant water “pillage” is sucking Yemen dry
-Air pollution ‘will become bigger global killer than dirty water’
-U.S. intelligence sees global water conflict risks rising
-Reflections on a Thirsty Planet for World Water Day
-Las Vegas plans to pump water across 300 miles of desert approved
-China plans to curb capital’s water usage
-The Colorado River delta blues
As a contribution to this ongoing refinement of the concept, I recently formulated five axioms (self-evident truths) of sustainability. My goal was simply to distill ideas that had been proposed previously and put them into a concise, easy-to-understand form.
The Post Carbon Institute animation 300 Years of Fossil Fuels in 300 Minutes with Russian subtitles.
The oceans may be acidifying faster today than they did in the last 300 million years, according to scientists publishing a paper this week in the journal Science. “What we’re doing today really stands out in the geologic record,” says lead author Bärbel Hönisch, a paleoceanographer at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory.
“We know that life during past ocean acidification events was not wiped out–new species evolved to replace those that died off. But if industrial carbon emissions continue at the current pace, we may lose organisms we care about–coral reefs, oysters, salmon.”
Strong as empires seem, every empire that’s ever existed has collapsed, except the one currently owned by the United States–and the odds on that one’s survival aren’t looking good just at the moment. Behind the rhythm of rise and fall that shapes the lives of empires lies a familiar relationship between the pressures toward limitless growth and the inevitable limits of a finite world.
We chatted with Herman Daly on a range of topics from ecology to economics, policy to politics, relocalization to religion. He is Emeritus Professor at the University of Maryland School of Public Policy, pioneered work on Steady-State and Ecological Economics, and has received more accolades and written more books than we can mention.
As economies contract, a global popular uprising confronts power elites over access to the essentials of human existence. What are the underlying dynamics of the conflict, and how is it likely to play out?
