Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
– Five Truths About Our Energy Future (from the IEA’s Fatih Birol)
– Is Oil Fueling the Rise in Political Partisanship? (analysis)
– Peak oil debate losing relevance due to new upstream technology: Repsol CEO
– David Strahan: Has the world reached economic peak oil?
– The Future of the Occupy Movement
– With support among police quietly growing, can Occupy cross over the thin blue line?
– Ron Paul Defends The 99 Percent: ‘It’s A Very Healthy Movement’
– Why Occupy Protesters Marched from Wall Street to DC
– Annie Appel’s Photography of Occupy Los Angeles
– Occupy the Kremlin: Russia’s Election Lets Loose Public Rage
Does Thursday’s announcement that the EU is considering to ban oil imports from Iran epitomise the draining of power from west to east? The big winners here will be China and India, who do not fear rising Iranian influence and who will gladly soak up any additional oil exports they may have to offer. However, ending this small dependency upon Iranian oil imports in Europe does clear the way for military action without the need to ponder the immediate consequences on oil imports.
With tougher times around the corner, we’ll need to find local sources of fossil-free food year-round. We can grow it, even in the northern USA and Canada. And we can plant food perennials and trees in pubic and private spaces.
If there is one unshakable belief in America today it’s that the U.S. economy can and must continue to grow. That’s why the messages delivered in November in Washington D.C. at a gathering of oil geologists, scientists, economists and others challenging that core belief went largely unheeded in the nation’s capital. The approximately 300 people who attended the 7th Annual Conference of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil–USA (ASPO-USA) in the shadow of the U.S. Capitol were told that economic growth is no longer possible as oil production flattens and declines, that U.S. energy independence is impossible and that domestic shale gas will fall far short of fueling American prosperity even while polluting the nation’s vital aquifers.
But it is one thing voicing a spiritual idea and another undergoing it in the real world. One thing to breezily state: well hey, we’ll just go into our cocoon and dissolve!, and another actually allowing those old caterpillar forms to break down, uncomfortably, inside ourselves and our social groups, to forge alliances without allowing our own allegiance to the ancien regime to destroy us from within.
-Contaminated water found leaking at Japanese nuclear plant
-Japan nuclear meltdown maybe worse than thought?
-Cesium Detected in Baby-Milk Powder Made by Japan’s Meiji; Shares Tumble
-A Waste of Waste
-UK government shared intelligence with nuclear industry, documents show
-France admits lapses after breach of nuke reactor security
When it comes to China policy, is the Obama administration leaping from the frying pan directly into the fire? In an attempt to turn the page on two disastrous wars in the Greater Middle East, it may have just launched a new Cold War in Asia — once again, viewing oil as the key to global supremacy.
“I want to go to war with China,” said presidential hopeful Rick Santorum in a recent GOP debate, showing the cavernous lack of any good sense that has become his trademark. Nonetheless, Santorum was probably speaking for many Americans who fear that China may soon overtake the US as the world’s single great power. By contrast, many of those same Americans probably think of Saudi Arabia, whose obliging princes seem always at the ready to pump extra crude onto the world market to temper oil price spikes, as the American motorist’s best friend. But what if the tables were turned, and the kingdom became the scourge of the American infidel while the People’s Republic was set to be our biggest ally? That’s the geopolitical premise of R. Michael Conley’s new peak-oil thriller Lethal Trajectories.
The delight about the rapprochement between Merkel and Sarkozy was short-lived, being undermined almost immediately by a threat from the credit-rating agency Standard and Poors. How are we to interpret these events?
The first round of the social justice movements took multiple forms across the world – the so-called Arab Spring, the Occupy movements beginning in the United States and then spreading to a large number of countries, Oxi in Greece and the indignados in Spain, the student protests in Chile, and many others.
The degree of success may be measured by an extraordinary article by Lawrence Summers – remarkable, considering that he has been personally one of the architects of the world economic policy in the last twenty years that has put us all in the dire crisis in which the world finds itself.
