Australia & Oceania

Alan Kohler had an interesting column in The Business Spectator recently ("The cars that ate Australia") warning that as our car fleet transitions from the internal combustion to electric vehicles, local car manufacturers need to start looking to manufacture EV's or they (and all their suppliers) will end up shutting down.

-After Smart Grids, Smart Sewage?
-A real bottler
-Lexicon of Change: The Rise of Transition Culture

Solar thermal is a way of harnessing the largest source of energy available to us, so in this post I'll have a look at the upswing in interest in the use of this technology for electricity generation in recent years and look at some of the approaches being pursued to make it economically competitive with coal fired power generation.

-US EPA chief concerned about gas drilling fluids
-Europe the new frontier in shale gas rush
-The true cost of shale gas production
-The Natural Gas Shopping Spree Quickens

Science has a paper on the changes to the current global food system required to support the expanded global population we'll see in a couple of decades time, noting that radical changes to agriculture will be required to support 9 billion people.

The world is immensely complicated, and the forces of sweeping change may overall boost transition towns for their positive contribution. Or as Ted Trainer lays out below, a course correction is needed now.

-How long before the lights go out?
-Peak Oil Theory: implications for Australia’s strategic outlook and the ADF
-The Iraqi Oil Conundrum
-A New Clean Economy — With Old Sources of Energy
-Business as Usual: Hooked on Foreign Oil
-Stop the Green Tech Coup, Military Industry on the Offensive

-Jim Rogers, The World Is Not Short of Grain
-The Suburbanization of Poverty: Trends in Metropolitan America, 2000 to 2008
-Is the "Volcker Rule" More Than a Marketing Slogan?
-“Bonds, Climate Bonds!”
-Prosperity Without Growth: Economics for a Finite Planet by Tim Jackson
-Economic growth 'cannot continue'

-UN climate chief admits mistake on Himalayan glaciers warning
-The New Storm Brewing On the Climate Front
-U.N. Panel’s Glacier Warning Is Criticized as Exaggerated
-"Glacier gate" - how the Murdoch press have got it wrong on the Himalayan big melt
-Hanging EPA regulations around Democrats’ necks
-Murkowski to call on Congress to block federal greenhouse gas regulation
-Emissions targets set for delay
-UN drops deadline for countries to state climate change targets

Pollyanna, a best-selling 1913 novel by Eleanor H. Porter, might well be the best model we have for describing the deeply-held set of mythologies that underpin our current economic structures. Pollyanna’s philosophy of life centered on what she called "The Glad Game", consisting of being eternally optimistic, finding something to be glad about at every turn.

For those who are concerned about the lack of an effective climate change agreement in Copenhagen, there is some consolation. Depletion of global fossil fuels is likely to force the world to move to alternative energy anyway. Higher energy prices will do what trading schemes won’t

-Approaching peak oil
-Copenhagen talks could leave oil industry with a sinking feeling
-IEA forecasts stir debate
-The peak oil debate: 2020 vision

-Cultivating Resilience: The Shelburne Falls Food Security Plan
-think global : eat local
-The Local Price Premium
-Nitrous oxide concerns cloud future of biofuels
-Regreening Africa
-Community Food Enterprise: Local Success in a Global Marketplace
-Grow $700 of Food in 100 Square Feet!
-N.J.'s food pantries and politics: Hungry people need food-- end of discussion

Saudi Arabia’s oil production company is Saudi Aramco. Its former Vice President of oil exploration and production, Sadad al Husseini, recently made the following comment on oil prices at the 30th Oil & Money Conference, held in London on October 20-21: "...as you go up to say $90 a barrel, you’re consuming 4.5% of the global economy [for oil]. That in itself is a ceiling - you cannot go indefinitely into more expensive alternatives without destroying [the] economy and therefore destroying demand..."

-H2OIL
-Paul Ehrlich interview
-What is Land For?
-Sustainability and spirituality
-The Hubbert Peak Theory of Rock, or, Why We’re All Out of Good Songs