Do you have 17 minutes? You might want to watch this moving presentation by Garth Lenz at TEDxVictoria.
Continue reading No other choice – leave the tar sands in the groundpeak oil
From the Post Carbon Institute
Posted Oct 1, 2010 by Richard Heinberg
This is the second part of a two-part post from a new book-in-progress with the working title ‘The End of Growth’. Only some of the book’s contents will be serialized this way. The final product, with graphs and footnotes, will be published by New Society Publishers in September 2011. Read Part 1 here. Read more ‘End of Growth’ excerpts.
Business Cycles, Interest Rates, and Central Banks
We have just reviewed a minimalist history of human economies and the economic theories that have come into vogue to explain and manage them. But there is a lot of detail to be filled in if we are to understand what’s happening in the world economy today. And much of that detail has to do with the spectacular growth of debt-in obvious and subtle forms-that has occurred during the past few decades. That phenomenon in turn must be seen in light of the business cycles that characterize economic activity in modern industrial societies, and the central banks that have been set up to manage them.
This article is an excerpt from Richard Heinberg’s new book which has the working title ‘The End of Growth’ and is set for publication by New Society Publishers in July 2011. Given the urgency and fragility of the global economic crisis, the Post Carbon Institute is serializing the rough content as Richard writes it. Additionally, Richard will be offering ‘live peeks’ at the events and information that inform his writing process through Facebook and Twitter accounts created expressly for this publication.
The article was originally published as the MuseLetter #222
Introduction: The New Normal
The central assertion of this book is both simple and startling: Economic growth as we have known it is over and done with.
The “growth” we are talking about consists of the expansion of the overall size of the economy (with more people being served and more money changing hands) and of the quantities of energy and material goods flowing through it.
The economic crisis that began in 2007-2008 was both foreseeable and inevitable, and it marks a permanent, fundamental break from past decades-a period during which most economists adopted the unrealistic view that perpetual economic growth is necessary and also possible to achieve. There are now fundamental barriers to ongoing economic expansion, and the world is colliding with those barriers.
Continue reading Intro: The End of GrowthRelocalization to the Rescue
By Larry Ely, Rob Crowner, and Steve Randall
“Civilized man was nearly always able to become master of his environment temporarily. His chief troubles came from his delusions that his temporary mastership was permanent. He thought of himself as ‘master of the world,’ while failing to understand fully the laws of nature.”
– Tom Dale and Vernon Carter, Topsoil and Civilization, 1955.
Our delusional sense of permanent mastership over the environment accelerated dramatically with the creation of the first American oil company, the Pennsylvania Rock Oil Company, in 1854. Melville had just been on a whaling ship hunting for another kind of oil and writing Moby Dick in 1851 – whale oil and wood having fueled American society until commercial oil extraction began in Titusville, PA. In 1854, ironically the very year we entered “sub-nature” by extracting subterranean oil, came a warning from another American savant on the folly of the pell-mell rush to industrialization “Ahab style.” Thoreau summarized his manifold pronouncements on the human being’s relationship to nature by saying in Walden, “We can never have enough of nature.”
Oil was cheap, involving opening a spigot instead of hunting for whales on the high seas. With the car’s advent we’ve been driven increasingly to be profligate oil users – out of touch with our bodies and each other. Cars have that passivity-inducing, separative effect. A ballooning, overweight body on the personal level now mirrors on the societal level the corpulent spread of the built environment (exurban sprawl).
Continue reading Relocalization to the Rescue“The automobile has not merely taken over the street, it has dissolved the living tissue of the city. Its appetite for space is absolutely insatiable; moving and parked, it devours urban land, leaving the buildings as mere islands of habitable space in a sea of dangerous and ugly traffic.”
~James Marston Fitch, New York Times, 1 May 1960
We have written about the “friction of distance”, explaining why travel was more challenging-and communities therefore more compact-in the time before humans discovered the enormous energy sequestered in ancient carbon sinks. Alas, those sinks are not infinite so we must contemplate the return of the friction of distance to the level of the pre-oil days. Fortunately, humans can look to past experiences to reduce the height of the learning curve.
Continue reading Resisting FrictionI thought it important to share this heartening news story from the 3/16/10 issue of Northampton's Hampshire Gazette by staff writer Ben Storrow. It concerns our state government working the way it should – taking its lead from the upwelling of the grassroots sense of how we should be farming and living in the new era we are entering with peak oil-induced growing energy costs and with growing environmental and economic damage from global warming. In very truth we now are experiencing a Daniel Shays rebellion out here in the western part of Massachusetts, but this time a practical, slow, and steady rebellion, a rebellion away from corporate food to real food. With this, corporate politics is sure to give way to real politics – as sure as night gives way to day.
What makes this story so uplifting for me is that in the same story we have Sen. Stan Rosenberg D-Amherst backing a project that is supported by a conventional, conservative farmer in Hadley, who in turn quotes Bill McKibben's 1,400 miles from farm to plate mantra without even knowing it. These ideas are certainly starting to percolate. The next phase is to give these ideas a name, and have that name on everyone's lips: relocalization.
Continue reading Legislators aim to boost local food in schools
In support of the recent adoption of a master plan by the Town of Amherst, the Pioneer Valley Relocalization Project submitted this essay to the Amherst Planning Board to highlight a critical issue confronting community planners and town executives everywhere: the looming crisis of peak oil and climate change. These are civilization-threatening processes caused by human action and must be confronted now – not later – by all planners sharing the goal of a sustainable economic and social future. Scientists throughout the world, including James Hansen of NASA and Rajendra Pachauri of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, have reached fundamental consensus regarding the climate threat while Richard Heinberg of the Post Carbon Institute and others in the academy and in the oil industry have articulated the same with regard to peak oil. Because the crisis is imminent, far-reaching, and human-caused, it can be avoided only through planned action, and must be a first-order objective at every government level – municipal, state, and nation.
Continue reading A necessary frame for the local master plan