Stories archived in Monday, December 6, 2010

In most legal systems, you have a right to freedom of speech or religion, but you don’t have a right to breathe clean air or drink safe water.

As the global supply of fossil fuels shrink and oil gets more expensive, foods that have to be shipped long distances - and particularly those that have to be refrigerated in transit - will become much harder to afford. Urban agriculture, which already seems to be undergoing something of a renaissance, will become more necessary.

"Our governments are incompetent at best, corrupt and greedy at worst, and people now get that. What Karl Rove couldn't accomplish, Hillary Clinton is driving home."

A soft landing for America 40 years from now? Don’t bet on it. The demise of the United States as the global superpower could come far more quickly than anyone imagines. If Washington is dreaming of 2040 or 2050 as the end of the American Century, a more realistic assessment of domestic and global trends suggests that in 2025, just 15 years from now, it could all be over except for the shouting.

I read Michael Brownlee's recent piece "The Evolution of Transition in the US", with a mixture of fascination and a sense of disquiet that increased the deeper I got into the piece. The concept of Transition has been regularly critiqued, a positive process which has helped to shape what it is today. Most critiques run along the lines of "Transition, nice idea, but it isn't [ ... ] enough". So, for Alex Steffen, Transition isn't technologically savvy or optimistic enough, for the Trapese Collective it isn't politically savvy enough, for John Michael Greer it is guilty of "premature triumphalism", for Ted Trainer it isn't sufficiently rooted in alternative culture or focused enough, while for others it is too riven with New Age thinking and pseudoscience. Now, according to Brownlee, it is fatally flawed by not having the "Sacred" at the heart of what it does.

Political prognostication is a dangerous game, but one of the certainties of the latest election was that the US will not be enacting any significant federal climate legislation. If inaction is certain on climate change, it may be that all is not entirely hopeless if we reframe the terms to addressing our carbon problem. Peak-oil activism could accomplish many of the goals of climate activists. Unlike climate change, peak oil doesn’t carry the ideological associations with the left that climate change does. Could peak oil provide a framing narrative for political action to address both climate change and peak oil?

A weekly roundup of peak oil news, including:
-Oil and the Global Economy
-OPEC's spare capacity
-Asia
-Offshore Drilling
-Briefs
-Quote of the week

It is no small thing to shift the burden of proof. Yet that is what Lawn and Clarke, and their colleagues, have done in this remarkable study. The presumption in the "empty world" has been that growth in GDP is "economics" in the sense that it increases benefits faster than costs, as well as in the sense that this thing we call the economy is getting physically bigger. Lawn and Clarke have shown that in a large part of today’s “full world” growth in GDP often costs more than it is worth at the margin, and thus should be called “uneconomic” growth.

Articles that we thought were significant this month.