Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Tom Whipple Major players in the oil industry are still in disagreement as to where oil prices will go in the near future. A few weeks ago, many financial writers were talking about $100 oil, but the sudden surge of volatility and turmoil in global financial markets has caused many to rethink their forecasts.
A volunteer-built church saved the island of Culebra, Puerto Rico, from being used as target practice in 1971. Later, land trusts have helped residents rebuild after hurricanes.
Lifelong friend, mentor, role model and champion of the planet Jan Lundberg passed away at peace during the night in his home and refuge in Greece where he had been laboring to revive sail transport in the Mediterranean Sea. Gate gate paragate parasaṃgate bodhi svaha!
The latest report from the IPCC is the first to abandon the measured tone of its previous ones and foretell what it considers a climate catastrophe for human civilization unless the world makes an abrupt U-turn and begins dramatic reductions in greenhouse gas emissions almost immediately.
And yet, even this forecast is probably too conservative in its pronouncements.
The Center for Ecoliteracy recently released a suite of free digital resources: videos, original animations, interactive pages, photography, and sample activities to help explore the relationships between food and climate change.
In the face of climate breakdown and ecological overshoot, alluring promises of “green growth” are no more than magical thinking. We need to restructure the fundamentals of our global cultural/economic system to cultivate an “ecological civilization.”
The question of whether we will see $100 oil before Christmas continues to dominate analytical comment in the financial press. The Iranian sanctions are the main factor that could drive prices substantially higher in the next year or so; however, there are many other forces at work that could lead to lower oil prices.
The coming concrete crisis | How plastic bags came to rule our lives | How to stop data centres from gobbling up the world’s electricity
Empires are short-lived structures created and kept together by the availability of mineral resources, fossil fuels in our times. They tend to decline and fall with the decline of the resources that created them, and that’s the destiny of the current World Empire: the American one.
The United States government has now officially embraced climate change as a catastrophe in the making. Only it contends that the catastrophe is now inevitable no matter what humans do…and so, we should do nothing at all since whatever we do won’t matter much.
Excerpts: A field guide to bad faith arguments | No, I will not debate you | Against civility, or why Habermas recommends a wild public sphere
We humans are constantly modeling the world around us to find patterns that will help us. But sometimes we forget that our models are just that, tentative outlines of how the world seems to work. Getting stuck on just one model with no flexibility is often the result of vested interests pushing that model. We need to be smarter than that to solve the problems we now face as individuals and as a global society.
