Stories archived in Tuesday, January 3, 2012

- NYT: Iran Warns the United States Over Aircraft Carrier
- Oil up 3 percent on Iran warning and U.S., China data
- Iran risk accounts for up to $10-15 of oil price: Reuters' Kemp (video)
- Crude Oil Prices Could Rise This Year, But Prices Could Be Very Volatile
- Conflict in Straits of Hormuz? $200 a Barrel Oil?

The Royal Town Planning Institute (RTPI) describes itself as “the UK’s leading planning body….” It recently released a 59-page discussion paper on Peak Oil, partly in preparation for a forum on this issue which is scheduled for January 17th in London.

The only way to describe what has happened to myself and a number of Occupy Vancouver organizers (and I suspect many other occupy organizers across the world) is to realize that we have been occupied by occupy! We have been captured and consumed by something that we don’t understand but that has served to rock our world; and that we know is something deeply important. Fortunately as we transition to Phase II (post encampment phase), we have some time to reflect.

When the time came to pull up stakes, our desire to pursue self-sufficiency meant that a destination with a temperate climate and reliable rainfall was a prerequisite. A job opportunity came, we did our research, weighed the pros and cons, and trusted intuition that this place offered better-than-average odds of weathering the gamut of changes that seemed to be imminent.

For being such a seemingly ordinary vehicle, the wheelbarrow has a surprisingly exciting history. This is especially true in the East, where it became a universal means of transportation for both passengers and goods, even over long distances.

The millenarian prophecies of doom that have rumbled on since 2000 are coming to a head this year, with the Mayan prophecy of the end of the world receiving serious news coverage. Often these reports run alongside statistical analysis of the state of the global economy and appear to have much the same level of credibility. Both encapsulate the feeling of powerless of the modern citizen and the give the lie to the notion of ourselves as rational economic men.

...In the forest where the passionflower grows, where its leaves have been used as a poultice for thousands of years, the Maya sit in small straw huts and weave patterns of extraordinary complexity, the most beautiful fabrics of the world in all the colours of the quetzal bird. In their imaginations and in their hearts they hold calendars of equal complexity, that rotate at different speeds like the stars around the sun. They have held these complex patterns inside them for thousands of years – patterns of time, of colour, of beauty. They held them before the cities came and after they fell into ruin. The temples did not hold them. The temples never do...

"...Are we on a slippery slope now? Can human-made global warming cause ice sheet melting measured in meters of sea level rise, not centimeters, and can this occur in centuries, not millennia? Can the very inertia of the ice sheets, which protects us from rapid sea level change now, become our bete noire as portions of the ice sheet begin to accelerate, making it practically impossible to avoid disaster for coastal regions?"