No, no, we won’t go (GM) – Mar 8
-Fury as EU approves GM potato
-France blasts GM crop approvals by EU agency
-Are GMOs the ‘financial innovations’ of agriculture?
-GM and farming technology ‘key to fighting climate change’
Technology
Do Texas and the North Sea foretell the future of oil production?
Oil supply optimists claim that new technology combined with private development of the world’s remaining oil resources–most of which are now under the control of government-owned companies–would vastly increase global oil production and put off any decline for decades. Texas oilman Jeffrey Brown isn’t buying it, and he cites the history of oil production in Texas and the North Sea to explain why.
Why Bill Gates is wrong
Bill Gates is right that we need more funding, support, and attention applied to energy technology. But if we truly seek to fashion a sustainable future, we need just as much applied to laws, regulations, infrastructure, economics, behaviors, and values. We need to innovate a new way of being in the world, not just new tools.
Obama: The Making of a Clean Coal President
President Obama has issued marching orders for the rapid national adoption of “clean coal” technology. Last week, shortly after his budget address, he ordered a high-level task force to deliver a plan within 180 days determining how “to overcome barriers to the widespread, cost-effective deployment of CCS within 10 years, with the goal of bringing 5 to 10 commercial demonstration projects on line by 2016.”
Humble Homes, Simple Shacks…
Derek’s book is a far cry from anything so conventional. He aims to inspire with his ideas, ideas that may well earn his book a place in tiny house history. What he ends up doing is reconstructing the mind into accepting what constitutes shelter. (Also “Build Your Own House”)
Impossible Farming
There is Successful Farming, Progressive Farming, Organic Farming, Natural Farming and an awful lot of Wishful Farming. I would like to add to the list one more kind: Impossible Farming.
Deep thought – Feb 8
– The Making of an Elder Culture
– Slow-tech: Manifesto for an overwound world
– Stuck accelerators: Toyotas and the fossil-fuel growth economy
– Energy flow, emergent complexity, and collapse
Climate & environment – Feb 8
-Defusing the Methane Greenhouse Time Bomb
-Think-tanks take oil money and use it to fund climate deniers
-China: Prince of Denmark
-Loss Of Species Hits Economy
Review: Why Your World Is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller by Jeff Rubin
Jeff Rubin, former chief economist at Canadian investment bank CIBC World Markets, is not your typical economist. He gets peak oil…And now, in his bestselling book Why Your World Is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller, he argues that oil prices, temporarily dampened by the deepest post-war recession on record, will soon be vaulted to new highs as the economy begins to recover, which in turn will thrust the world into yet another recession right on the heels of this one.
ODAC Newsletter – Jan 29
This week saw the Chairman of one of the world’s major oil companies publicly acknowledge the approaching peak in oil production…
Review: The American West at Risk by Howard G. Wilshire, Jane E. Nielson and Richard W. Hazlett
The American West at Risk’s 13 chapters examine some of the major human-caused environmental problems now threatening the 11 contiguous Western states…Citing trustworthy, peer-reviewed studies in support of its arguments, and written by three trained scientists, this book has every claim for credibility—and is an enlightening and gripping read for scientists and laypeople alike.
Throwing our energy at impossible dreams…
“as mankind proceeded to get bigger and bigger we silently crossed a threshold”
