Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Some people say that now is not the time to be talking about the climate emergency because people are feeling anxious, afraid and overwhelmed, and that you and I should desist from dating until the COVID-19 crisis is over. I suspect that those saying this never took the climate and biodiversity emergencies seriously in the first place, and they don’t understand that just as the causes of our troubles are linked, our solutions must also be linked.
Whether the world returns to some semblance of normal by summer or whether the horror of COVID-19 continues into the fall and winter, the problem is that confidence has already been shattered.
At Post Carbon Institute we have been closely monitoring the global COVID-19 pandemic and encouraging our staff, volunteers, and broader community to take great caution and practice social distancing. But that doesn’t mean we should disengage.
We live in dystopian times. The crisis of global capitalism is revealing itself in the most uncompromising fashion. Quantitative easing – the one ‘solution’ to the last crisis – has only re-inflated the global financial bubble, and created the prospect for the next impending crisis to be greater than witnessed heretofore.
Welcome to Crazy Town, where most of the inhabitants just want you to keep contributing to an economy already in overshoot, keep distracting yourself from the most important stories, and (most of all) keep your mouth shut.
Our society needs a real conversation about the meaning and nature of economic growth. In a time of populist politics and rising regional discontent, it is more important than ever to examine new models and approaches of sustainable, equitable and just development.
With enormous changes going on worldwide, with the ecosystem collapsing, with natural resources dwindling, with the human population still expanding, we may be rather facing a Seneca Collapse that will make short work of the European nation-states, just as the current crisis is destroying the American Empire.
On the surface, things appear normal but beneath the lid, a pot of trends is coming to a boil.
I was in Greece from June 23 through July 5, the experience was both enlightening and disturbing, and is worth relating.
American institutions are in decline and rife with corruption brought on by a combination of hitting the limits to growth while under the control of neoliberal capitalism.
Suggestions on how society might better adapt, physically and psychologically, to what’s ahead.
If oil is “just another commodity,” then there shouldn’t be any connection between oil prices, debt levels, interest rates, and total rates of return. But there clearly is a connection.
