Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
It was the pivotal international conference of the new century. Tens of thousands showed up, including heads of state, officials at all levels of government, representatives of environmental organizations, and ordinary citizens from nearly 200 countries. Scientists had warned that, without a strong agreement to reduce carbon emissions, the consequences for civilization and the world’s ecosystems would be cataclysmic.
NASA climate scientist James Hansen never expected the U.N. climate talks in Copenhagen to amount to much. He told the British Guardian newspaper that it would be better if Copenhagen failed. That’s because Hansen is a vocal critic of the economic policies discussed there, and he hopes Copenhagen’s failure gives the public a chance to talk about new options.
-Ed Miliband: China tried to hijack Copenhagen climate deal
-Carbon Supplicants on the Copenhagen Pilgrimage
-Review of the Year 2009: Climate change
-How do I know China wrecked the Copenhagen deal? I was in the room
-There’s No Negotiating With Nature
-BC Fossil of the Decade Awards
-Copenhagen’s failure belongs to Obama
-Clear-Cutting the Truth About Trees
-Doom and Gloom
-Mammals May Be Nearly Half Way Toward Mass Extinction
Current renewable energy technologies must be adopted in conjunction with aggressive Smart Growth and Efficiency if we hope to continue our current standard of living and complex society with diminished reliance on fossil fuels. These strategies have the additional advantage that they can work without large technological breakthroughs.
-Copenhagen: a look back at the most striking narratives
-If you want to know who’s to blame for Copenhagen, look to the US Senate
-There is a way ahead after Copenhagen
-Copenhagen: Things Fall Apart and an Uncertain Future Looms
-All over the map: Rounding up editorial reax to Copenhagen
-No One Is Going To Save You Fools
-Copenhagen – Historic failure that will live in infamy
-Terminator 2009
-A Climate Con: Analysis of the Copenhagen “Accord”
“as mankind proceeded to get bigger and bigger we silently crossed a threshold”
The language of revolution should be used as a last resort and against odds that can be beaten only with radical thought and action. It requires justification or, at the very least, explanation.
I’ve gottten literally dozens of emails begging me to weigh in on the East Anglia climate scandal, and for a while, I was reluctant to do so, because ultimately, paying attention to something so inane just gives it credibility. We’re back, again, to the old battles over climate change — attention to trivialities in the absence of the central issue.
New research from the Soil Association reveals that if all UK farmland was converted to organic farming, at least 3.2 million tonnes of carbon would be taken up by the soil each year – the equivalent of taking nearly 1 million cars off the road.
With a long-time eye to declining energy resources, Bart Anderson envisions a very different society in five years. The former editor of Energy Bulletin.net offers advice for post-oil living: Understand the problem. Prepare psychologically for big shifts and the unexpected. Find your niche and get good at it. See what your great grandparents did as a model for living well within limits. “Live poor and learn to do it well” as Bart did as a graduate student. Things will be very different, he said, but we’ll make it through.
The central message of the presentation is that Britain – irrespective of the ramifications of the global issue of peak energy – faces a series of problematic choices in order to re-negotiate our lifestyle within the biophysical limits that will assert themselves over the next few decades. These problems cannot be avoided, and they are complex because they affect so many aspects of our economic, social and material well-being today. For that reason they are innately political, and thus require the political parties of Britain to engage with these issues in order to map out a means of dealing with the crises these changes will generate.
First I should confess to a strong bias toward the content of this book. As readers of my blog, Question Everything, will realize, I have been moving inexorably toward the same conclusion as the author, so you will perhaps forgive me if you think I may be suffering from a lack of sufficient critical thinking. Put bluntly, I think this is a book every thinking human being should read, and then consider for themselves.
