Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
A serious dispute has broken out among economists about fiscal deficits in the United States. Paul Krugman has been making the rounds on the talk shows, arguing that more stimulus spending is required to spur job creation…Jim Hamilton, whose work on oil price shocks has made him a familiar figure to those concerned about liquid fuels, is worried about the debt load the government is accumulating.
A midweek roundup of peak oil news, including:
-Prices and production
-Iran
It’s been a good couple of weeks for whistleblowers, with the IEA and an important climate change center both hit by claims that data has been fudged. Hard questions might similarly be directed at a good many of the “facts” that shape most of today’s policy decisions — including those that are defining the industrial world’s nonresponse to peak oil.
-Obama Adds Troops, but Maps Exit Plan
-Iran vows to expand its nuclear program
-A strategy to encourage Afghans and allies alike
-Iran left out in the cold
-U.S. Lethargy at Copenhagen Might Be Best for Climate
-Global warming is happening now
-Climate and Capitalism
-The Manufactured Doubt industry and the hacked email controversy
-Disagreeable truth about the coming Copenhagen charade
-Is global warming unstoppable?
-The Urgent Threat To World Peace Is … Canada
A few people have been in touch to ask whether, in the light of the recent illegal hacking into UEA’s emails, and the proposition by climate deniers that some of the emails that have emerged prove climate change is a scam, Transition Network now intends to renounce the absurd notion of human-induced climate change. Of course not.
With the revelations that key climate change emails were disclosed to be promoting a definite-climate-change public message, with the Hadley Climate Centre taking a hit, and raw climate data used in conclusions having been trashed, there has been fodder for activists and lobbyists opposing meaningful cuts in greenhouse gas emissions. And it all happens to come right before the Copenhagen climate change conference.
I’ve gottten literally dozens of emails begging me to weigh in on the East Anglia climate scandal, and for a while, I was reluctant to do so, because ultimately, paying attention to something so inane just gives it credibility. We’re back, again, to the old battles over climate change — attention to trivialities in the absence of the central issue.
We cannot be lulled into a false sense of security: though oil prices have declined from their historic highs, there is little doubt that peak oil is real. A 2008 research project completed at Washington University in St. Louis found strong evidence in support of the theory. Please feel free to circulate this academic document as a primer on peak oil.
Peak Oil, Climate change and the Greater Depression will pose many challenges to our way of life but let’s get real, for a moment: Golden Hordes aren’t one of them. At least not now. Economic depression brings with it a host of serious problems, and I think you can say quite confidently, without being a chicken little, that most of the world is in a Greater Depression.
As the UK political parties begin their preparation for next year’s general election, this week’s ODAC newsletter takes a break from the usual format to pose 3 questions to the next Energy Minister…
Unless and until we mobilize a mass movement to take down and transform the U.S. legal, political and economic systems upholding the fiction that corporations possess the same constitutional rights as individuals, along with other hallmarks of corporate power, it is fruitless to blame green consumers for the failure to spur large-scale meaningful change.
