Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Broken promises and naive expectations — that’s how many people at the McPlanet Conference held recently in Berlin clearly felt about the last two decades of environmental policies as the 20th anniversary of the Rio Earth summit approaches — with the UN intending to organise another conference in Rio to mark the event.
– Lundberg: Humanity’s chances dimmed when many progressives love slave-jobs and cheap gasoline
– Suicides have Greeks on edge
– Chomsky: On the History of the US Economy in Decline
– ‘Hug the Monster’ for Realistic Hope in Global Warming (or How to Transform Your Fearful Inner Climate)
– IMF working paper – “The Future of Oil: Geology versus Technology”
– World Oil: Aleklett’s new analysis of peak oil is refreshingly comprehensive
– Now Playing at a Computer Near You: The ASPO-USA Webinar Series
– T. Boone Pickens: Biggest Deterrent To U.S. Energy Plan Is Koch Industries
– Cheap Oil Built ‘The American Way’ but All the Cheap Oil is Gone
This document was found on the computer of Ecotopia author Ernest Callenbach (1929-2012) after his death:
“As I survey my life, which is coming near its end, I want to set down a few thoughts that might be useful to those coming after. It will soon be time for me to give back to Gaia the nutrients that I have used during a long, busy, and happy life. I am not bitter or resentful at the approaching end; I have been one of the extraordinarily lucky ones. So it behooves me here to gather together some thoughts and attitudes that may prove useful in the dark times we are facing: a century or more of exceedingly difficult times.”
The linking of development policy, pursuit of wellbeing, and alternative indicators in a new economic paradigm is a strong step toward establishing a sane and sustainable civilization that focuses on meeting human needs with ecological efficiency. To get there, centuries of infinite-planet economic thinking have to be swept aside. Traditional development theory begins with the idea that some nations are underdeveloped — nations that don’t have a western, industrial, consumerist economy. It also supposes that all the nations of the world want that kind of economy and that they can have it. But all three presumptions are false.
It’s hard to think of any word more freely bandied about in contemporary political discourse than “democracy,” and harder still to think of one freighted with a heavier burden of wishful thinking, utopian fantasy, and entitlement. As industrial civilization staggers toward its end, however, today’s fashionable contempt for democracy as it actually exists may become a potent force driving societies in crisis toward far worse options.
May Day is a day of liberation — a day to be seized and celebrated, a day to remember who was shot down on it and who fought for it. It’s a day to join those who fought and fight for liberation, to imagine what its most delicious and profound possibilities might look like.
-Fracking ‘Health Challenges’ to Be Examined by U.S. Advisers
-Restrict shale gas fracking to 600m from water supplies, says study
-Reporting of fracking and drilling violations weak
-Lancashire schoolgirl wins chance to address MEPs with anti-fracking video
-Chesapeake plugs blown Wyoming well
-Drillers May Frack First, Disclose Later Under Draft Plan
It appears as if organizers have gathered enough signatures to put an initiative on the November ballot in California which would require the labeling of genetically engineered foods. Of all the efforts to date to mandate such labeling, this initiative seems most likely to succeed in a state known for its health consciousness and its widespread organic agriculture (which doesn’t permit genetically engineered crops). But passage of the California initiative would almost certainly lead to a court battle as major producers of genetically engineered seeds seek to have the new law invalidated.
In the wake of last week’s post, I’d meant to plunge straight into the next part of this sequence of posts and talk about the unraveling of American politics. Still, it’s worth remembering that the twilight of America’s global empire is merely an incident in the greater trajectory of the end of the industrial age, and part of that greater trajectory may just have come into sight over the last week.
The fact that economists were at the podium questioning the equivalence of happiness and GDP is a hopeful sign, a sign of a deep crack in the foundation of the economics discipline. But it is one thing to say there is more to happiness than economic growth; it is quite another to propose that economic growth is inimical to generalized happiness. None of the speakers advocated an end to growth – that would be called, in the present vocabulary, economic stagnation or recession. Instead, they invoked, again and again, “sustainable development,” a phrase I must have heard 30 times.
Antonia Juhasz’s book Black Tide is a devastating indictment of the oil and drilling industry that was responsible. But she doesn’t stop there. She’s also included damning evidence of the role of U.S. politicians, government agencies and regulations that all failed to protect the people and environment of the Gulf.
