Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
It’s not that you are discounting yourself – it’s that the personal you with all its small indulgences, its interiorities and subjective biographical events is turned inside out suddenly and asked to be someone else. Someone who acts within the bigger picture. Your own Spring uprising.
A midweek roundup of peak oil news, including:
-Developments this week
The facts are these, in case Mr. Will is interested: we have a serious energy crisis and an even graver potential crisis. Petroleum resources are depleting worldwide, and new reserves aren’t coming into production fast enough to offset the rate of depletion. Fuel prices are once again on the rise. Many people can’t afford to operate their automobiles now, and it’s likely to get worse. The civil unrest in the Middle East threatens to disrupt the flow of petroleum and, thus, torpedo our global economy…In this age of energy instability, do we really want to say no to rebuilding our passenger rail capabilities?
In recent months, people have filled the streets in the Middle East, the Balkans, Africa, and many parts of the United States. Their targets are local: autocratic leaders, corrupt politicians, and dismal economies. They’re not performing acts of global solidarity. Nor has there been an outbreak of some protest virus. These demonstrations are responding to specific conditions. Tunisia isn’t Bahrain. Croatia isn’t Burkina Faso. Madison, Wisconsin isn’t Frankfort, Kentucky. Let me rashly and prematurely propose a name for our era: the Age of Activism.
A weekly roundup of peak oil news, including:
-Oil and the global economy
-The earthquake
-Quote of the week
Program for the meetings about Peakoil at the European Parliament (03 May) and Walloon Parliament (26 April)
As I entered the Fred Flinstone structure that characterizes the convention center in Palm Springs, I was intensely curious about what kind of people would come to The Prophet’s Conference on 2012. It was odd enough that I was there. Such an expedition into the high dessert for a weekend of lectures by speakers dispensing insight into the Mayan prophecy required serious wu wu credentials.
I did have a journalist’s curiosity and, having reported mostly from the doomer’s corner concerning planetary demise, I thought there might be interesting parallels in the prophecy corner.
– Heinberg in Totnes: “The End of Growth” (video)
– What is “Gross National Happiness” ? (video)
– In China, to get rich is not always glorious
– What the Fight Against Measles Can Teach Environmentalists
– The New American Pessimism
– Kunstler interview: The old American dream is a nightmare
– Krugman: Degrees and Dollars
– New poll shows independents warming to the role of government
Localism, as has been discussed here in the past, is the idea that central government should be made smaller for ideological reasons, and that power is dispersed to local councils and communities instead. While in some areas of life this is really important, and key for a successful Transition, in terms of climate change, it is a disaster.
As a wave of anti-union bills are introduced across the country following the wake of Wall Street financial crisis, many analysts are picking up on the theory that award-winning journalist and author Naomi Klein first argued in her 2007 bestselling book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. In the book, she reveals how those in power use times of crisis to push through undemocratic and extreme free market economic policies. “The Wisconsin protests are an incredible example of how to resist the shock doctrine,” Klein says.
Oil prices were buffeted this week by escalating violence in Libya and fear of further disruption in the Middle East on the one hand, and a new debt crisis in the Eurozone threatening further economic turmoil on the other. In Libya this week the Gaddafi regime has launched a full scale military offensive against the rebels and appeared on Thursday to be gaining the upper hand.
