Full Newswire

Rob Hopkins writes: "The new absolutely brilliant Transition Network website is here!!" The site’s goal is to support the Transition Towns movement with reliable community-owned information about the most important elements of the movement: the initiatives, projects and people.

-Money spent on tar sands projects could decarbonise western economies
-China's oil demand increase 'astonishing', says IEA
-OPEC sticks to its guns, demand rising

-Smile now, cry later
-Perils of the Stationary State
-Erik Assadourian: our society needs some serious cultural engineering
-Who negotiates for nature?

-Outer Ring Suburbs and the Permanent Foreclosure
-Designing Cities for People: Farming in the City
-Cleveland’s Comeback
-The secret mall gardens of Cleveland
-10 Land-Use Strategies to Create Socially Just, Multiracial Cities

The most telling sign that the United States is well down the road to ruin is the jobs situation. I'm about to tell you some seriously depressing stuff, so get ready.

In January of this year, American political consultant Dr. Frank Luntz released a 17-page talking points memo titled “The Language of Financial Reform,” in which he urges opponents of bank reform to reframe the effort as a mishmash of bailouts, loopholes and bureaucracy. In short order, Luntz-listening legislators lined up to shout “BLACK” at the kettle, before returning to their work crafting endless loopholes to bail out campaign contributors in their home states. I read the memo upon its release and promptly tossed it in my compost bin (I’m always short on browns).

A little while ago, Alex Steffen of World Changing offered a critique of the permaculture-inspired Transition Towns initiative--a grass-roots, peak oil/climate change adaptation movement that has gone viral around the world in the past three years . . . Steffen would describe these people as “dark greens,” a brand of environmentalist who emphasizes local community action but can tend toward collapse-thinking or doomerism.

There’s some fascinating new research about “CO2 domes,” invisible clouds of carbon pollution that hover above urban areas.

The United States Joint Forces Command regularly (about every two years) issues its “perspective on future trends, shocks, contexts and implications for… the national security field.”...Amid the multitude of security threats, energy has moved rapidly to the forefront, and it is the oil supply issue which is the focus of this review.

A midweek roundup of peak oil news, including:
-Prices and production
-China