Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Henry Red Cloud’s address is 1001 Solar Warrior Road on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. But the road sign hasn’t arrived. A windmill towering over the cottonwoods in the draw of White Clay Creek marks the location of Red Cloud Renewable Energy Center and his “Solar Warrior Community.”
To restore the body requires a readaption to nature. To renovate exhausted soil or soil rendered sterile with pesticides and herbicides and artificial fertilizer requires perseverance. It takes time for the body, revved up by an exotic, highly processed, high-fat Western diet, to reorganise and recover its natural appetite. It takes time to learn how to absorb the kind of food Fukuoka (and several contemporary Western writers on food) are talking about: plenty of plants, not much meat, not much. It takes time to break habits and to let go of the complexity of diets and science in one’s mind and the emotional reactions caused by an unnatural way of life. To engage in a way of being where food is naturally limited by place and time.
It’s time for the second monthly Transition podcast, in which we return to November’s “Round-up of What’s Happening out in the World of Transition” and go into more depth on three of the stories it contained.
In the 1970s, Howard T. Odum explained human economics using ecology and energy fundamentals. His work remains essential for ecologists, who imagine achieving “sustainability.”
Odum’s energy economics begins with an understanding that energy provides the foundation for all life processes, but that all energy is not equal. As energy is transformed through an ecosystem, quantity decreases as concentration increases.
Many people who know about climate change know little about peak oil. Many who know about peak oil dismiss climate change. Why? How can two problems have roughly the same cause, potentially major global consequences, and be understood so poorly? Why do some people dismiss one and not the other? Is one group right and the other wrong? I’d like to take a shot at explaining this mystery from a few angles.
After years as an ardent advocate for “renewable”, “alternative” energy, I looked through another lens. I stepped back and looked at the whole process of making wind and solar devices.
It took several years to work through the mind change. I saw a show on the mining of copper on the History Channel’s Modern Miracles. I looked at other components of wind and solar – the getting of basic materials, the refining, the manufacture, the assembly, the installation and all the necessary transportation. I saw the environmental degradation. I finally I saw clearly that solar, biomass and wind devices were not “renewable” nor “alternative”. They are an extension of the fossil fuel supply and burning world along with the devastation to the environment of the land, river, underground water, ocean and air.
It’s all too easy to feel that hope is lost. But with your help, we’re determined to make 2012 the year that resilience built.
2011 has been another turbulent year … looming behind it all — increasingly acknowledged, but still not often addressed — resource, environmental, economic, and social constraints.
For Post Carbon Institute, the question has not been, “What to do?” but rather, “What to do first?” There are so many challenges, all of them interrelated, and so many areas that need attention. Building on the wise counsel of our Fellows, Board, Advisers, Allies, and Supporters, PCI has developed three primary strategies:
Welcome to our second annual list of the top ten peak oil books. Most of them are explicitly about peak oil, while others deal with energy depletion as a significant factor in the economy or the environment.
As The Big Engine That Couldn’t has faltered for several years, it is becoming increasingly clear the economy is running off the tracks. Both investors and the public are beginning to realize the long-revered goal of endless economic growth is failing. Anger and fear are widespread, as the livelihoods and hopes of ordinary Americans are being destroyed. Anger runs among the “99%” over economic injustices that favor the “1%”. Fear, however, may run among 100% over this question: How do we live when economic growth fails?
A look at tidal power, which is virtually inexhaustible on relevant timescales, is less intermittent than solar/wind (although still variable), and uses old-hat technology to make electricity. Is it “abundant,” “useful,” or “a waste of time”?
Why did the Deepwater Horizon blow up last year, kill 11 workers, and cause the massive oil eruption into the Gulf of Mexico? You’re likely to get different answers if you talk separately to a petroleum engineer or an anthropologist. When they team up, it gets really interesting. Anthropologist Joseph Tainter (author of The Collapse of Complex Societies) and petroleum engineer Tad Patzek talk about the new book they’ve co-authored: Drilling Down: The Gulf oil debacle and our energy dilemma.
There’s plenty of understanding that efficiency measures can sometimes (often) fail if they fall victim to Jevon’s Paradox. The common response is that we need to couple efficiency measures with a carbon tax or similar policy that give people both the means and the incentive to decrease energy consumption. But let’s look at the underlying goal of a carbon tax: to change behavior. How does it change behavior? By penalizing undesirable behavior (financially). The downside to a carbon tax is that it requires overcoming many political hurdles that don’t seem likely to be overcome anytime soon. What are the alternatives?
