powering down

Stop Talking Right Now about the Threat of Climate Change. It’s Here; it’s Happening

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Because we have burned so much oil and gas and coal, we have put huge clouds of CO2 and methane in the air; because the structure of those molecules traps heat the planet has warmed; because the planet has warmed we can get heavier rainfalls, stronger winds, drier forests and fields. It’s not mysterious, not in any way. It’s not a run of bad luck. It’s not Donald Trump (though he’s obviously not helping). It’s not hellfire sent to punish us. It’s physics.

We’ll always Have the Sun: Solar Energy and the Future of Humankind

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Asking if renewable energy can replace fossil energy implies that the only possible civilization is our civilization as it is nowadays, including SUVs parked on every driveway and vacation trips to Hawaii by plane for everyone. But keeping these incredibly expensive wastes of energy will obviously be impossible in the future, even imagining that we were able to stay with fossil fuels for another century or even more.

Family Life Without Fossil Fuels—Slow and Satisfying

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The PA is a 110-acre homestead run by Ethan and Sarah Hughes, who have two young daughters. Their reliance on fossil fuels is limited to trains for long-distance trips, municipal water, and a telephone landline. They purchase bike parts, bulk grains, and tin roofing, as needed—but that’s about it. No electricity, no gas, no cars, no planes.

Climate Change Doesn’t Care about Anyone’s Opinion: Notes on Reciprocity and Sacrifice

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How do we revalorize the idea that the community, from which we are not separate, though we are an individual species within it, is “Nature,” aka the biosphere, and every aspect and part thereof? And finally, how do we re-learn the value of reciprocity in our relations with the natural world, our community?

Helping Others Eschew Oil (How to Make Your Life Less Oily in 2017, Part IV)

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So you’re working on reducing your own oil use but maybe you’re downhearted. Maybe you figure, why bother? I’m just an oily drop in an oily nation. What does it matter if I cut my own oil use if everyone around me wallows in the stuff?

Richard Heinberg on ‘America First’

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From a Transition perspective, a shortening of trade distances has to be a good thing, right? Bringing manufacturing back closer to where people live, thereby reducing carbon emissions, enabling more money to cycle within the national economy rather than globally? So far, so Transition… And yet.

The Dark Cellars Project: An Aesthetic of Revolt

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The Dark Cellars are an expanding network of oppositional artists, graphic agitators, renegade marketers, and culture jammers more generally who are using art, design, and image to creatively subvert the structures of meaning which entrench consumer culture and carbon capitalism.