Stories archived in January, 1000-January, 9999

I was so gratified to see Wendell Berry’s remarks in a recent interview (“Wendell Berry: Landsman” with Jim Leach in Humanities magazine, May/June 2012) where he makes a point about economics that is overlooked in these days when divisiveness rules the political roost. The general view is that the economic battle is between capitalism and socialism, but as Wendell observes, “both are industrial systems and they have made the same mistakes in some ways.” Both have ignored “the propriety of scale and the standard of ecological health.”

-Busting the carbon and cost myths of Germany's nuclear exit
-The energy transition juggernaut
-Clean energy as culture war

-Government backtracks on fracking
-Investor's concerns lead to calls for fracking changes
-Fracking In New York: For Farmers, Gas Drilling Could Mean Salvation-- Or Ruin

Off the back of my recent post on Transition Money, this excellent new short film, 97% Owned, explains the privatised, debt-based money system we currently use. The one that allows UK banks to simply create around £200,000,000,000 (£200bn) a year and use it as they see fit -- without any oversight -- to shape the economy and control politics, causing crises, creating inflation and pushing house prices out of reach.

Most of us work for money, but these people are magicking it up and then using it to pay others to do whatever they please. How is this different from legalised slavery?

Why does there always seem to be enough money for military expansion, prisons, bank bailouts and tax cuts for the wealthy, but not enough for education—or for jobs, housing, healthcare, or old age pensions? These are not “welfare” but are part of the social contract for which we pay taxes and make social security payments.

Gainful unemployment is slightly different from radical homemaking, although the two strategies used together make for a dynamic synergy. In radical homemaking, someone from the household may have a normal job while someone else in the household works to keep living expenses low by helping the household to produce more than it consumes. Gainful unemployment is a strategy that Bob and I had to figure into the mix in order to survive, as it became clear early on that neither one of us wanted to go out to a job, but we still needed to pay some bills.

We’ve all heard that wind energy is too expensive, and that massive investments in wind will drive up electricity rates for consumers. This argument is based on the belief that wind energy is more expensive on a per kilowatt-hour basis than traditional fossil fuels. While even this premise is up for debate (for example, wind is now the least expensive option for new generation for some utilities in the upper Midwest), the bigger problem is that this argument ignores how electricity markets actually work.

The single biggest reason for Dutch success in making biking safe and popular is their policy of separating bike lanes from moving vehicles on busy streets, either by physical barriers such as curbs or bright painted markings on the pavement.

Political economist, activist and writer Gar Alperovitz and Post Carbon Senior Fellow Richard Heinberg discuss 'Equality and Inequality in a Shrinking Economy--Strategies and Consequences'.

This is a recording of video chat recorded May 22, 2012.

- The Chelsea flower show is nature for the 1%
- Randers: “Don’t teach your children to love the wilderness”. Discuss
- Don’t Put Monsanto in Charge of Ending Hunger in Africa
- The power of bread: let us eat politics
- Kenyan TV show ploughs lone furrow in battle to improve rural livelihoods