News update
If We Release a Small Fraction of Arctic Carbon, ‘We’re Fucked’: Climatologist
From Vice.com
Recently, scientists have made a disturbing discovery in the Arctic Ocean: They saw “vast methane plumes escaping from the seafloor,” as the Stockholm University put it in a release disclosing the observations. The plume of methane—a potent greenhouse gas that traps heat more powerfully than carbon dioxide, the chief driver of climate change—was unsettling to the scientists.
Heading Toward The Sidewalk
By John Michael Greer, The Archdruid Report
The author, a well-known writer on peak Oil and related topics, argues that another economic crash is imminent in the U.S., this time because the fracking/shale gas bubble is about to burst.
Blame the Environmentalists
By Richard Heinberg, Post Carbon Institute
CEOs of companies engaged in shale gas and tight oil drilling are undoubtedly aware of what’s going on in their own balance sheets, hype is an essential part of their business model.
Why doesn’t the ‘long emergency’ feel like an emergency?
By Kurt Cobb, Resourceinsights.blogspot.in
In 2006 when James Howard Kunstler published his breakthrough book The Long Emergency, the next two years seemed to vindicate his warning that the oil age was coming to an end with perilous consequences. By autumn the stock market had collapsed and with it the world economy. Oil, too, then collapsed, trading in the mid-$30 range by December as demand for oil fell off a cliff with the economy. It seemed for months that the world was headed for an economic depression.
Transformative Common Sense in Vermont
By Eric Zencey, Steadystate.org
Because GDP-based economic development is so wrong-headed, the state of Vermont’s commitment to use Genuine Progress Indicator as a yardstick is a matter of common sense; and yet, because GDP-based economic development is so deeply woven into the substance and texture of our political economy, using basic common sense here is a powerfully transformative act.
GDP: The Infinite Planet Indicator
By Eric Zencey, Steadystate.org
If economists know GDP is not a measurement of economic well-being, why have they continued using it as a proxy for this?
Some Thoughts On Resilience and Transition
By Saral Sarkar, www.eco-socialist.blogspot.in
Just How “Legal” Are Seed Libraries?
From the Post Carbon Institute
After the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture cracked down on a community seed library, hundreds of seed libraries in the U.S. are suddenly wondering if they are breaking the law.
I’d be happier if I didn’t write this stuff!
By Kurt Cobb, Resourceinsights.blogspot.in
For years my father–who is a really great guy–has been telling me that I’d be a happier person if I didn’t write about all the converging threats bearing down on the human race. Turns out he’s right! Here’s what a new study said on the matter: Recent evidence suggests that a state of good mental health is associated with biased processing of information that supports a positively skewed view of the future. Depression, on the other hand, is associated with unbiased processing of such information.