North America

Woody Tasch has thought a lot about money: what it does, how it moves, and how to connect people who have it with people who need it...But he found that even socially responsible investing couldn't do much to fix an economy that focused too much on extraction and consumption and too little on preservation and restoration.

-Female farmers find goats a good, but busy choice
-Chickens come home to roost in backyards around the USA
-Bite-Sized: Small cattle make big impression
-Saving The Bed-Stuy Farm: Choose Better Nutrition, Not Demolition

In my view, the Uppsala study is unduly pessimistic, implying an immediate crisis (in 2010 and thereafter) which is not in accord with reasonable expectations about future production levels both within OPEC and outside the cartel. In alerting the public to the peak oil issue, the Guardian is doing good work. But not knowing any bettter, they picked the wrong study in my view. The false choice the Guardian offers us, the IEA or Uppsala, amounts to a kind of all or nothing proposition.

Not many years from now, there will be a huge uproar over who missed the coming of peak oil. There will be Congressional hearings and much finger pointing and protestations that the peaking of world oil production was impossible to predict.

-Will rising oil prices derail the recovery?
-Banks Hasten to Adopt New Loan Rules
-Finite Resources: One Possible Explanation for the Financial Crisis
-What Is Inflation and How Does One Measure It?
-They can make this rally last for years

These are merely my notes from the conference. I hope they will be useful to others as an index to the volumes of material that were covered.

-Obama and Hu aim to agree greenhouse gas targets
-China's empty city
-China's Blunt Talk for Obama
-Market cornered for rare minerals
-Chinese credit card debt mounts

A recent front-page report by the British newspaper, The Guardian, is the latest reason why Canada needs a top-level analysis of global hydrocarbon supplies. The Guardian’s November 9th story is headlined “Key oil figures were distorted by US pressure, says whistleblower.” The story focuses on the world’s top energy monitoring and forecasting body, the International Energy Agency (IEA).

The truth is that we have at least two central problems (the economic one is tied to both in the long term), and only people who can get their mind around the combined difficulty will have anything useful to offer. Yes, we need to know how what fossil fuels are in the ground – and we also can’t burn them rapidly. Yes, we need to address climate change – and we need to stop lying and claiming that we can have it all – a happy growth economy based on renewable energy, yada yada.

-Program could match Colo.'s next generation of farmers with land, expertise
-Feeding the city
-The Nitrogen Fix: Breaking a Costly Addiction
-Aid Groups, Farmers Collaborate to Re-Green Sahel

-The most recent economic downturn is a peak oil recession
-Oil: future world shortages are being drastically underplayed, say experts
-Oil reflects dollar moves, not market dynamics: Yergin
-Is the world awash in oil?

I decided to write another rather basic level article because there are so many people I meet who have heard a bit about the oil situation, and it is hard to point to one single article to give an overview of some of the current issues. Regular readers will find many repeats of graphs. There are some new ones, as well, from the Denver ASPO-USA conference. Because there is so much to tell, the story gets a little long.

It is well over a decade now since environmental concerns became pressing enough to command attention in almost all realms of intellectual and practical affairs, and well over four decades since environmental ethics developed as a recognizable field of study in response to a growing set of global problems. Yet in contrast to this broad trend, environmental concerns have remained at the farthest margins of bioethics. As improbable as it seems, bioethics has remained tuned out and disconnected from the ecological realities of our current world.