Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Articles from last month that we found fresh or significant.
Articles on economic contraction, the ghost of ASPO-9 (climate change), the PUBLIC Library.
Plus: peak oil on Australian TV, Bathtubs: A theory of community relations, UK’s happiness movement, building a mass climate movement, sustainable ideas from religion, Octogenarian recalls the First Great Depression.
-How close is peak oil?
-Russia halts petrol exports
-EIA budget cuts to curb some energy data gathering
-University Vows to Lock Out Students Opposed to ExxonMobil
In just a century, we’ve become almost entirely dependent on cheap oil. We rely on oil for just about everything, in fact the global economy is reliant on its free flowing supply. So what would happen if the well started to run dry and demand outstripped supply? Some oil industry experts think we’ve already hit Peak Oil and we should brace ourselves for the imminent Oil Crunch.
One no longer needs to go through the long and often arduous process of becoming a “person-in-the-foreign-culture” in order to spout off in public as an expert about its core realities. The new discourses about the other are predicated, more often than not, on an underlying belief in the essentially normative and universal nature of US cultural, political and economic behaviors.
People in power seem to be waking up to the importance of oil and talking about it in public in ways that they never have before. But this raises some questions: Do they (or we) have any idea about the likely impacts of different interventions proposed to deal with energy problems? and how can the energy implications of different interventions be assessed?
In this essay I aim to answer these questions with reference to a paper published in Energy Policy titled “The energy implications of replacing car trips with bicycle trips in Sheffield, UK”.
It’s tough to convince people that there is a need for radical change of their attitudes and behavior in relation to energy issues. Cognitive mechanisms that produce beneficial results under most circumstances can lead to an irrational resistance (if not immunity) to any kind of argument aimed at our own set of beliefs about peaking global oil production, renewable energy resources, and the continued viability of nuclear power.
Knowledge stands at the beginning of everything purposefully created. It takes knowledge to build farms and machines, to build firearms, or to steward the land. Having knowledge often means having power. Inequalities in access to knowledge often lead to power-inequalities.
The development and implementation of K-12 concentration camps is not part of some giant conspiracy. Rather, it is the outcome of the way our educational system was created. Most of the people who originally developed the system believed they were doing the right thing, and they did not try to hide their plans or intentions. It was completely consistent with the perspective, derived from religious organizations, that the domination, cohesion, and vitality of society were inversely related to individualism; permitting free inquiry and action were anathema to control by religious societies and also by corporate society.
A non-profit organization in Oakland, Planting Justice, works to empower youth to resist the corporate-controlled and toxic industrial food system and become young leaders in the burgeoning urban food justice movement…Developing skills in critical thinking, community organizing, public speaking, and ecological entrepreneurship, these youths are changing the way they identify with the food they consume and becoming leaders to other students on their high school campus and in their after school programming.
Reviews of three novels set in the wake of the oil age:
– Player One by Douglas Coupland
– Ship Breaker by Paolo Bacigalupi
– Afterlight by Alex Scarrow.
We cannot expect to maintain a steady state economy at present levels because present levels are deep into planetary overshoot.
“You’re so pessimistic,” one student said. Another added, “There are alternative energy sources and electric cars that are coming along.” Yet another said, “Look, oil prices are high because of speculation –there’s really lots of oil left.” … Another, who had not spoken during the discussion, said, “I get what you’re saying; it’s pretty damned late to be thinking about this stuff if you’re right, isn’t it?”
