Matthew Simmons has bad news for Vermont

You think the financial crisis unfolded quickly? That’s nothing compared to how fast things could happen with oil. That’s the message Matthew Simmons, chair of the oil investment banking firm Simmons & Company International, delivered last month at a conference on peak oil. Vermont is unprepared for change of that rapidity.

A politics of crisis: low-energy cosmopolitanism

2008 is the year of a triple shock: the global food crisis (which made the realities of food-insecurity palpable), the global oil-price rise (which put localised transition on the agenda as never before) and the global financial hurricane (which gave the state as agent a new lease of political life). The long-term consequences can at present be only dimly discerned. [Discussion of leftism and localization]

Peak greed

At one time I decided to give greed a chance, immerse myself in it by devoting all of my waking hours to the study of money. If bankers and I were sharing the same floor of Hell, such an obsession couldn’t be all bad. Maybe Hell just needed a makeover. We could spruce it up, refinance it, remodel…