Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
The impact of the Tooth Fairy Syndrome is all the more felt in the main media and among politicians – with the end result that so many lay people (and many experts) end up highly confused about what to think and do about energy matters.
The ‘peak oil’ controversy is staging a come-back as the industry confronts higher costs—and low prices
As you read this, humankind has used up nature’s budget for the year.
At this point most people appear to know that something is terribly, terribly wrong in the United States of America.
Thus it’s not inappropriate to ask what happened to all the apparent political momentum the climate change movement had ten or fifteen years ago, and why a movement so apparently well organized, well funded, and backed by so large a scientific consensus failed so completely.
Clearly, individuals, households, communities, and nongovernmental organizations cannot merely stand by and hope that political leaders somehow find the wherewithal at the last moment (if it is not already too late) to halt our descent into climate chaos.
OVER THE LAST two centuries in the West, we have been telling ourselves that economic growth is the most direct path to prosperity, that the good life implies material affluence, and that technology and ‘free markets’ will be able to solve most of our social and environmental problems.
We need an economy which follows laws of physics and of nature.
‘The pain we feel is capitalism dying.’ The words left an impression on me I think because they describe that strange, existential ache that we probably have all felt at some time or another, when contemplating how we should live our lives in a world that seems so tragically off track.
The low-impact way of life that is emerging at Wurruk’an has been captured on film as part of a documentary called A Simpler Way: Crisis as Opportunity, written and produced by Jordan Osmond (Happen Films) and Samuel Alexander (Simplicity Institute).
Peak oil, as a theory, has been downplayed, because models predicted that we’d hit peak oil production between 2000 and 2010, and we didn’t–instead, we plateaued.
It’s not looking good for the global fossil fuel industry. Although the world remains heavily dependent on oil, coal and natural gas—which today supply around 80 percent of our primary energy needs—the industry is rapidly crumbling.
