Peak Oil Review – Feb 20 2017
A weekly roundup of Peak oil news. Oil prices have moved little since they jumped from the mid-$40s to the mid-$50s in late November. Last week was no exception.
Tom Whipple
Appropriate Civilization versus New Despotism: State of Play on 20th February 2017, one month into the Trump presidency
Suddenly believers in the possibility of a better civilization, one rooted in increasing human co-operation and harmony, find ourselves in a world where demagogues can now realistically plot the polar opposite: a new despotism rooted in rising isolationist nationalism and human conflict. The more we dig into how the demagogues and their supporters have organised their recent successes, in particular in using technology to manipulate voter beliefs on an industrial scale, the more terrified many of us find ourselves.
What Permaculture Can Teach Us About Commons
As a developed set of social practices, techniques and ethical norms, permaculture has a lot to say to the world of the commons. This is immediately clear from reading the twelve design principles of permaculture that David Holmgren enumerated in his 2002 book Permaculture: Principles and Practices Beyond Sustainability.
Working with Straw
These days, human-scale straw bales have been largely replaced by mammoth cylinders that require mammoth farm equipment; another way we have used the cheap energy of recent decades to burn our bridges. If you can find some of the old rectangular, metre-long bales, however, they can be put to many uses.
How to Create an Accessible Bike Share
Cities of all sizes now have bike share systems. But many of these systems often only have one or two types of bikes, and these may not be suitable for people with certain physical disabilities. We connected with Jon Terbush from bike share provider Zagster to find out how cities can create accessible bike shares.
Community Fridge in Frome UK Reduces Food Waste, Feeds the Needy
I was spurred on to start this project by the global epidemic of food waste — as much as 50% of all food grown worldwide gets wasted before and after it reaches the consumer. Most of the food waste in the UK is avoidable — it could have been eaten had it been better managed. The Community Fridge: Frome is a simple solution that is replicable across all communities, enabling anyone to share some of this surplus food while cutting costs and emissions.
Josh Fox: The Dakota Access Pipeline Fight Is Far From Over
Now we’re at a point where we can name currency, debts, big finance, big extraction, consumer values, advertising, the global corporate state. We can name that common colonizer, that common enemy and we have to address it and own it for what it is because we are all part of it. For me, I’m just one soul that has to be willing to sacrifice something in order to liberate from this thousand year old enemy.
The Next System Project, Reconsidered
But while I certainly agree that it’s (long past) time to talk about what comes next, and that there’s a very widespread need for something entirely different, it doesn’t really follow – and I’m far from sure – that what we most need is a “next system”. Why so?
EU Coal Plants ‘Should all Close by 2030’
EU countries should close all of their coal plants by around 2030 if they want to stick to the Paris Agreement on climate change. This is the conclusion of a new report by research non-profit Climate Analytics. The cheapest way to meet Paris targets is to replace EU coal power with renewables and energy efficiency, it says.
Where the Rubber Hits the Road: Biking in all Seasons
While the momentum of all-season cycling has been building slowly for decades, progress has accelerated greatly in the past ten years. One result is that city governments across the northern hemisphere are working not only to add new cycling infrastructure, but to keep the bike lanes cleared and safe through the winter.
The World as Will
It’s impressively easy to misunderstand the point made in last week’s post here on The Archdruid Report. To say that the world we experience is made up of representations of reality, constructed in our minds by taking the trickle of data we get from the senses and fitting those into patterns that are there already, doesn’t mean that nothing exists outside of our minds.
The Circular Economy: Is it the Solution to Resource Depletion and Pollution?
As Christian Arnsperger suggests, to retrieve the idea of circularity requires a second concept, that of sufficiency, of “enough”. Without that, it is at best a way of postponing the inevitable crash, and at worst a way of giving false credibility to the growthist delusion. So the idea of resource cycling loops needs combining with the radical reduction of consumption, long product durability, re-use and repair.