News from May 2011

China hikes electricity rates to counter shortages

China has raised electricity rates for some industrial users as parts of the country grapple with their worst energy crisis in years, despite concerns higher costs may add to inflation. Residential rates were unchanged, the government announced late Monday. It gave no details of where the changes would be imposed. The increase of about 20 [...]

Preparing Emotionally And Spiritually: Carolyn Baker and Margaret Emerson

Carolyn Baker and Margaret Emerson at Boulder Book Store, May 4, 2011

Everything you’ve heard about fossil fuels may be wrong

Are we living at the beginning of the Age of Fossil Fuels, not its final decades? The very thought goes against everything that politicians and the educated public have been taught to believe in the past generation. According to the conventional wisdom, the U.S. and other industrial nations must undertake a rapid and expensive transition [...]

Down and dirty: Is peak soil more pressing than peak oil?

Filmed as part of the 2011 Ideas Festival, Brisbane. Visiting the US ‘Dust Bowl’ in 1929, future President Roosevelt observed: “a nation that destroys its soils destroys itself”. Vegetarianism and veganism are on the rise as ethical dietary choices. However, the undiscussed consequence of this trend is the increase of large-scale cereal agriculture and its [...]

Gasoline Gangsters Episode 23: Peak Oil & Christianity

What do oil and Christianity have in common? In this episode I explore the idea that as people use more energy they become less religious. According to Matt Savinar we all worship oil as our new god. As oil leaves our economies what will we worship then?

Food prices will double in 20 years causing mass world hunger, says Oxfam

The prices of some staple foods will more than double by 2030 unless world leaders reform the global food system, Oxfam has warned. The aid charity warned that millions more people could suffer food shortages in two decades due to a ‘perfect storm’ of ecological and sociological factors. A combination of population growth, climate-hit harvests [...]

Beware Malthusians in reasonable clothing

The ambient jazzy, folky music – possibly nicked from a nearby Starbucks – had been turned to mute. The lights were dimmed. And the effect was near instant. The postgraduate-dominated audience under-populating the Bloomsbury Theatre in London was finally settling down in glum anticipation of ‘My vision for the future’, the first public event of [...]

The CIA Accurately Predicted How Long World Oil Supplies Would Last—in 1978

Perhaps I am atypical, but I’ve always been hypersensitive to what’s going on around me in the real world. Among my earliest childhood memories are the gas lines that followed the 1973 Arab oil embargo; the event which probably planted the seed that sprouted into awareness of peak oil during my fifth decade on this [...]

The future doesn’t have to suck

Saul Griffith is one of those people with whom you know you are not going to win a mine-is-bigger-than-yours argument. Certainly not when it comes to the size of your brain. The graduate from University of NSW and the University of Sydney, Dr Griffith completed a PhD in programmable assembly and self-replicating machines at the [...]

Canada on Secret Oil Offensive: Documents

The Canadian government has been carrying out a secret plan in Europe to boost investment and keep world markets open for the Alberta tar sands, collaborating with major oil companies and aggressively undermining European environmental measures, documents obtained by The Dominion reveal. In 2009 the federal government launched a strategy to “protect and advance Canadian [...]