Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
– Inside Cuba’s urban agriculture revolution (video)
– Flight ban could leave UK short of fruit and veg
– Beating obesity
– The trouble with Brazil’s much-celebrated ethanol ‘miracle’
– ‘Biggest problem you’ve never heard of’: Peak phosphorus
– Phosphorus famine: The threat to our food supply (Scientific American)
When we think about the taxes and the federal deficit, we don’t usually think of Social Security and Medicare, because in government lingo, the payments we make for these programs aren’t taxes, they are contributions, and the funding deficit for these programs is not taken into account in determining the federal deficit.
– US military warns oil output may dip causing massive shortages by 2015 (Guardian)
– Will peak copper haunt us before peak oil?
– Energy Secretary Chu’s optimistic view of energy future at EIA conference
– German study quantifies speculative premium in crude prices
– Horse-drawn Hummer
This is a case study in which you are invited to answer the question, “What did the Easter Islander who cut down the last palm tree say while he was doing it?”
During the pre-recession years of the 21st century, we experienced wide-ranging nonrenewable natural resource (NNR) scarcity on a global scale for the first time. Supplies associated with an overwhelming majority of the global energy resources, metals, and minerals that enable our industrialized way of life failed to keep pace with increasing global demand during the 2000-2008 period, resulting in global NNR supply shortfalls.
Review of two recent additions to the post-petroleum literary canon:
– Julian Comstock by Robert Charles Wilson
– Crossing the Blue by Holly Jean Buck.
I invested a lot of time into finding our post-carbon landing pad. I tend to side with realtors on this one: location, location, location.
I found it fairly easy to model gold production both for the world and the main producers in my 2009 post The gold peak, easier to model than the oil peak (part II). In this post, I have tried to do the same for copper production.
As a historian, Carolyn Baker has a keen eye for current events that are indicators of the collapse we’re seeing all around us. But she’s also a psychologist concerned about how we personally navigate the turbulence and find meaning within it. The author of Sacred Demise: Walking the Spiritual Path of Industrial Civilization’s Collapse, she describes the old story that isn’t working anymore (humans are separate from nature), and the new story we must live by for real sustainability.
I came back to my computer to find that many of my fellow Sciblings have recently taken up issues of resource depletion from various interesting perspectives – doing my work for me, I guess ;-). It isn’t exactly news to most of us that we’ve been using just about every resource on the planet far too casually, but it is interesting to see them tied together.
The problem of excessive phosphorus loading is affecting water bodies in all parts of the world, including Lake Winnipeg, which is the tenth largest lake in the world by surface area, and among the most heavily loaded with phosphorus of the world’s great lakes. … While our total global phosphorus reserves remain unknown, statistics on deposits found in recent decades indicate that more phosphate is being extracted than discovered. Although dwindling rock phosphate reserves may challenge our industrial model of agriculture, it will also stimulate innovation and create new economic opportunities for capturing and recycling phosphorus back onto agricultural lands.
Alan Kohler had an interesting column in The Business Spectator recently (“The cars that ate Australia“) warning that as our car fleet transitions from the internal combustion to electric vehicles, local car manufacturers need to start looking to manufacture EV’s or they (and all their suppliers) will end up shutting down.
