Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
As the fossil fuel age winds down, will the public be so amenable to setting aside additional landscapes, keeping them out-of-bounds to extractive industries? Will it even be willing to defend the national parks we already have?
-Population Growth Steady in Recent Years
-Stop blaming the poor. It’s the wally yachters who are burning the planet
-The coming Population Wars: a 12-bomb equation
-Factoring People Into Climate Change
-When It Comes to Pollution, Less (Kids) May Be More
-Copenhagen and population growth: the topic politicians won’t discuss
One of the reasons discussions of whether “organic” and “local” can “feed the world” often founder so badly is the whole set of presumptions that preceed such a discussion. So let’s talk about those – James McWilliams’ book _Just Food_ and others have stirred up a good bit of controversy on this subject, and lots of people seem to know the answers. But the real problem is that most people don’t really seem to understand what the questions are.
-The Problem With ‘Eat Local’
-James McWilliams’ over-hyped and undercooked anti-locavore polemic
-Just Food
Within the span of a couple generations, we abandoned a durable, finely textured, life-affirming set of living arrangements characterized by self-sufficient family farms intermixed with small towns that provided commerce, services, and culture. Worse yet, we traded that model for a coarse-scaled arrangement wholly dependent on ready access to cheap fossil fuels.
India’s Ministry of Environment and Forests has released a quick set of five studies to support the Indian government’s claim that it can quickly grow its economy without destabilising emissions negotiations. The intention is clearly to take a ‘scientific’ stand at the Copenhagen meeting in December to project the central government objective of steady GDP growth. Although India’s climate arguments versus the west are allied with China’s, the People’s Republic has publicly been more diplomatic.
One “emerging consensus view”, even among politicians who continue rooting for economic growth if only to claw tax receipts for paying off swollen national debt, is that world oil demand will ceiling if not crater. Peak Oil has won converts, some of them even able to openly admit it is real, but mostly selling oil saving and oil substitution to consumers as part and parcel of the hunting down of the Evil Molecule called CO2.
The next case of $120 oil, assuming we get there before the industrial economy falls into the abyss, will be brutal for an already over-stretched American consumer. Banks are falling like dominoes on a mule cart over the bumpy terrain of declining energy supplies. When will the lights go out?
-‘Eco-Therapy’ for Environmental Depression
-Saving the planet, one block, one small project at a time
-India pays couples to put off having children
-Unpopular Science
-“Peak Civilization”: The Fall of the Roman Empire
-The Problem is Us
Everyone agrees: our economy is sick. The inescapable symptoms include declines in consumer spending and consumer confidence, together with a contraction of international trade and available credit. Add a collapse in real estate values and carnage in the automotive and airline industries and the picture looks grim indeed.
