AGW - And still the deniers deny!!!

We went skiing last week. It's beautiful in the French Alps, really really stunning, yet something quite unusual about skiing on "natural" snow (versus fake stuff created to pad out the pistes) when the air temperature was somewhere near 20c. In isolation this is nothing to be alarmed about, individual and localised weather phenomena does not indicate climate change. But you have to ask if this is localised or is this a pattern of climatic shifts that we will begin to see more and more in the future?

"Today may mark the seventh straight day of 80 degree temperatures at O'Hare, something that's never happened before in March. Or in April, for that matter. "It is extraordinarily rare for climate locations with 100+ year-long periods of records to break records day after day after day," the local office of the National Weather Service said in a statement on Sunday morning, following a Saint Patrick's Day that shattered 141 years of records." - Bill McKibben published in the Guardian on Tuesday 20th March 2012.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/mar/20/us-heatwave-climate-change-republicans?CMP=twt_gu

Hey, I love the good temperatures in the months that historically are cold, but haven't any of you stopped to think... wait a minute, if that's the temperature NOW, WTF will the temperature be at the height of summer?


Food for thought!

Never forget that we are not pre-emminent in this world. We are not the most evolved organism on Earth. We are but stewards, currently doing a piss-poor job of looking after our ONE HOME!

Please help.

Please wake up.

Please share.

All I want is to be left alone?

One of the major concerns of attempting to reduce your dependence on current structures of "support" provided by contemporary government, is whether you will actually be allowed to drop off the grid. The structures set up to support western culture have been succesful in providing basic services and provide a minimal safety-net in case the unthinkable befalls you and you are destitute, but aren't these simply control mechanisms?

If we try and remove ourselves from these state apparatus and form more localised, more useful, more humane groupings can we? This isn't really a thought experiment, it's a genuine question as energy descent will require much more localisation, much more community cooperation, much more self-reliance.

"The decentralized provision of basic necessities is not likely to flow from a utopian vision of a perfect or even improved society (as have some social movements of the past). It will emerge instead from iterative human responses to a daunting and worsening set of environmental and economic problems, and it will in many instances be impeded and opposed by politicians, bankers, and industrialists. It is this contest between traditional power elites on one hand, and growing masses of disenfranchised poor and formerly middle-class people attempting to provide the necessities of life for themselves in the context of a shrinking economy, that is shaping up to be the fight of the century."

http://www.postcarbon.org/article/714558-the-fight-of-the-century

I cannot recommend Richard Heinberg more highly. He along with others at the Post Carbon Institute are trying to challenge the status quo, trying to challenge business as usual model, I implore you all to read and get involved in any way you can.

Sssh Climate Change!

"ExxonMobil last week reported its 2011 profits at $41 billion, the second highest of all time. Do you wonder who owns the record? That would be ExxonMobil in 2008 at $45 billion."
http://www.postcarbon.org/article/704040-the-great-carbon-bubble-why-the


We, and by "We" I mean everyone else, especially in the UK will NOT be discussing climate change this week. We have one the driest and warmest Decembers, followed by guess what, that's right one of the driest and warmest January's in history, but this last 10-days have seen pretty cold temperatures here in Blighty. If you can be bothered to check the weather maps it's not hard to see what's going on and let's face it, it's Winter people, so you'd expect some cold and icy weather. Or at least we used to see/expect "winter-like" temperatures and conditions.

So "We" can't even comprehend that we have quite a serious problem of climate change happening around us, ALL OF US, EVERYWHERE!

Of course the newspapers will confuse climate with weather and claim that a few cold days must dispell the rumour of climate change, this being demonstrably false and simply lazy journalism. But let's be fair to the journalists, they work for a money-making business which derives a majority of it's income from advertising revenue so can't really criticise too vociferously the hand that feeds them. (You can read the brilliant book Guardians of Power by David Edwards & David Cornwell for more insight into this!)

So who has the most to lose if climate change became an accepted norm and not a "fringe theory"? Look no further then those companies that EARN the most:

"And when they do break their silence, some of our elite organs are happy to indulge in outright denial. Last month, for instance, the Wall Street Journal published an op-ed by “16 scientists and engineers” headlined “No Need to Panic About Global Warming.” The article was easily debunked. It was nothing but a mash-up of long-since-disproved arguments by people who turned out mostly not to be climate scientists at all, quoting other scientists who immediately said their actual work showed just the opposite.

It’s no secret where this denialism comes from: the fossil fuel industry pays for it. (Of the 16 authors of the Journal article, for instance, five had had ties to Exxon.) Writers from Ross Gelbspan to Naomi Oreskes have made this case with such overwhelming power that no one even really tries denying it any more. The open question is why the industry persists in denial in the face of an endless body of fact showing climate change is the greatest danger we’ve ever faced.
Why doesn’t it fold the way the tobacco industry eventually did? Why doesn’t it invest its riches in things like solar panels and so profit handsomely from the next generation of energy? As it happens, the answer is more interesting than you might think.

Part of it’s simple enough: the giant energy companies are making so much money right now that they can’t stop gorging themselves. ExxonMobil, year after year, pulls in more money than any company in history. Chevron’s not far behind. Everyone in the business is swimming in money."
http://www.postcarbon.org/article/704040-the-great-carbon-bubble-why-the

As refeerenced in the above article, there is something quite beautiful, but also quite startling about this image courtesy of NASA, do you see?

Agrarian Anarchy

When one considers energy descent we have to at least consider alternatives to our current way of living. This can be traumatic, not least because we (well I) really haven't been exposed to anything other then neo-liberal capitalist economic dogma. We need to properly study our history and take examples from our pasts that can offer us alternatives. Now I don't want to get into a discussion on the merits of Marxism or Parecon or some other econmic theory, but what I would like a discussion on is the merits of Agrarian Anarchy.

Anarchy, that misquoted and misused word that we all fear right? Wrong!

“Anarchism is not a romantic fable but the hardheaded realization, based on five thousand years of experience, that we cannot entrust the management of our lives to kings, priests, politicians, generals, and county commissioners”; (2) “Anarchism is founded on the observation that since few men are wise enough to rule themselves, even fewer are wise enough to rule others”; and (3) “A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government.” - Edward Abbey

My learned brother is a keeper of an eye-watering array of literature on anarchist writings and would be best placed to take up this discussion, but for today and for the coming weekend, you only need consider that the current arrangement in our Western Culture is only a contemporary attempt to organise us into easily managed resources. It's not really for us... we are so much better served reverting to our former selves, selves that learned to focus on a reliable and clean food source, potable water and a means of keeping warm. Seems simple enough, but with our modern-selves surrounded by a bigger and bigger array of things to keep us indoors, how can we ever transition from our current living arrangements to a more sustainable, worthwhile, challenging and egalitarian situation?

"It should be clear that the industrial economy is making us sick, mentally and physically, and also greatly reducing habitat for our species on Earth. As a result, I’m a big fan of terminating this set of living arrangements — that is, I’m a fan of terminating industrialized civilization — and replacing it with a more sane and durable set of living arrangements."

http://guymcpherson.com/2012/02/toward-an-economy-of-earth/

What alternatives do you see?

Me Versus Machines!

I'm always keen to get my Wednesday/Thursday posting by John Michael Greer (The Archdruid Report). I hope you all have dipped into his writings over the past couple of years as his clearly expressed thoughts have provided quite a considerable amount of solace during difficult times. There are many writers/commentators out there who fear a changing world and can only see disaster ahead (Kunstler, Orlov etc), contrary to this position is Greer.

With his background in Druidry he has facilitated some excellent discussions on his blog about what a energy descent will/could look like, but goes further and provides really pertinent resources for helping anyone deal with a changing future and how to retool.

http://www.culturalconservers.org/library.php
http://www.greenwizards.org/?q=forum

If you are new to him I advise going back a few months and reading some earlier posts as each week follows from the last. This weeks post was interesting, simply as it made me think about my previous comments on creativity and resourcefulness as a focus for educating my little pudding Freya.

"There are any number of other examples of things that human beings can do, or can learn to do, that will fill essential needs in a deindustrializing or fully deindustrialized world, when permanent shortages of concentrated energy suitable for powering machines makes the vast majority of today’s technology useless except as scrap. A significant number of them are still being practiced, or—like the Art of Memory—can be revived with relative ease from written sources dating from the Renaissance or, in some cases, more recently still. A great many more will need to be invented, or reinvented, in the years ahead. The supposedly serious thinkers of our time are unlikely to contribute anything to that task; in contemporary industrial civilization, as in every other human culture, the basic qualification that makes thinkers respectable is an unthinking acceptance of the basic myths of their era. Nowadays, the myth of progress is one of those basic myths, and the myth of the machine stands right beside it."

http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2012/02/recovery-of-human.html

Limits to Growth

Big birthday coming soon, FORTY! Sometimes I like to project what life MAY be like for Freya in 2050 on her 40th birthday... what will be the "norm", how far would energy descent have gone, how will 2050 compare with 2012? Well the clever minds of MIT through the Club of Rome published what they called the Limits to Growth in 1972, attempting something like my thought experiment the year I was born, Forty years ago. I bring this up for two reasons, 1) if any of you clever peeps can find me an original copy of this work, not the republished and updated versions of 1992 and 2002 you'd make my birthday a happy day; 2) it surely is an essential read for anyone who wants to question how we can continue to consider unlimited economic growth as the only measure of progress on a finite planet.


Todays online Guardian has a mention of this:

There are many problematic issues to do with growth that can't be covered here. Clinging to growth, however, suffocates the imagination needed to devise more convivial ways to share a finite planet. At the very least, and with so much evidence to the contrary, the burden of proof now lies heavily on those who reject the original message of the Limits report, for them to demonstrate how, and under what circumstances, we could possibly enjoy "growth forever" in a finite world. Kenneth Boulding, the founder of general systems theory, thought this to be a view held only by "madmen and economists".

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/feb/01/limits-to-economic-growth

Hopefully I'll be able to edumacate myself enough so that I can pass on the necessary skills... scratch that... I need to be able to teach my little pudding two things, creativity and resourcefulness.

We are all aware of the 500lb Gorilla in the room, right? It's not just me who sees it?

What is your energy descent plan?

You may see a little more of this coming over the coming months (posting of special interest pieces) as I believe there are brighter people then me that can talk clearly, passionately and in some cases humourously about energy descent. I encourage you all to follow regularly some of the blogsites listed at the sides of my blog, but if i find some pearl, it'll be posted here too.

"Right now, global food supply is largely sustained through oil-powered “green revolution” technology. In the US, we spend 9 calories of petrochemical energy per food calorie which we consume. In Bangladesh, about 1/2 calorie of human and animal energy goes into producing each calorie of food energy consumed. The petro-energy has meant that we get by with very little human and animal energy. In our equation, it is treated as negligible. A lot of the energy devoted to the calories we eat comes from our cars, refrigerators and cooking devices. Also, we are wasteful of this energetically expensive food. If you throw out half of what you cook, after leaving it sitting in the fridge, you doubly worsen your calorific efficiency." - John Day

http://guymcpherson.com/2012/01/personal-choices-in-uncertain-times/

Time to get tooled up?

A New Challenging Year

Another year gone by the wayside, very little of anything positive to write about in 2011, but in 2012 the blog is my creative outlet focus. So have any of you noticed the small incremental changes going on around us, much like the frog in the slowly heating pot, I doubt it! But fear not, I will endeavour to find the time to share my own thoughts along with respected others this coming year.

The focus remains on the changes that need to be made during an energy descent, with the sincere hope that the changes are slow enough so as we can cope with the transition in as painless a way as possible. This is not a pet project or a whim but increasingly my responsibility to myself, my precious daughter, my extended family and my friends.

"In a time when the survival of the human race is in question, to continue with the status quo is to cooperate with insanity, to contribute to chaos. When darkness engulfs the spirit of the people, it is urgent for concerned people to awaken, to rise to revolution. The cleverness of the human mind has led us to the complex, horrifying, and all-encompassing crisis that we now face. The familiar solutions, based on a limited view of what a human being is, continue to fail, to be pathetically inadequate. Yet we pour vast resources into these tired solutions and feel that if we achieve a grand enough scale, the old solutions will meet the new challenges. Do we have the courage to see failures as failures and leave them to the past? Do we have the vitality to go beyond narrow, one-sided views of human life and to open ourselves to totality and wholeness? The call of the hour is to move beyond the fragmentary, to awaken to total revolution." - Vimala Thakar

http://www.enlightennext.org/magazine/j34/thakar.asp

Time to get our hands dirty and reconnect with the land?



Peace and Love

Energy Descent

I've recently discovered this little gem of a website and wanted to share with you an essay on the site regarding energy descent.

http://www.simondale.net/house/essay.htm

I particularly like the simple positive feedback cycle they have in this essay. Once again it all points in the same direction that we are embracing, an ordered descent from our current fossil-fuel rich lifestyles to a more sustainable future.