Economics

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

Oil prices fluctuated in the high $70’s this week reflecting the ups and downs of the dollar. Higher oil prices are loosening the discipline around the implementation of OPEC oil quotas as producers cash in...

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.

-Go forth and multiply a lot less
-The new wave of urban farming (and fresh food from small spaces!)
-Urban farms a fertile idea
-Summary Presentation for Plan B 4.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization
-The next Industrial Revolution will be people-powered
-Sustainability and Social Justice: Do the Math
-Greening Portland - Your City How To

Many of the articles that discuss the causes and effects of humanity's unprecedented energy use are entirely theoretical, offering little practical guidance for the everyday reader. This essay offers respite to all the people who confront our collective energy problems with a furrowed brow and an expression that is puzzled by the continuous stream of theoretical insights that explain our current circumstances.

A weekly review including:
- Production and prices
- Cambridge Energy’s new report

John Michael Greer has officially established himself as an institution within the peak oil community. Truly one of the finest minds working on the predicament of modern-day industrial civilization, he is so well-read in so many fields that he regularly gains access to insights that utterly elude his contemporaries. For this he is treasured by a growing number of loyal readers—and, I suspect, hated by equally many fellow bloggers who wish that they could be half as good.

One of the most rarely used resources for relocalization projects is the fact that our species has been this way before -- the twilight years of many other civilizations featured the breakup of centralized economic arrangements and the rise of a new localism. Can insights from past examples offer us guidance in the present case?

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

Our current food systems are precarious and vulnerable to external ‘shocks’. A combination of one or more external factors, such as extreme weather conditions, global conflict or trade disputes could easily disrupt the continuity of food supplies unless we make fundamental changes to the way we farm, process, distribute and eat our food over the next 20 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.

-Gazprom defends rigid contract terms with Europe
-Gazprom dismisses warnings of lengthy gas glut
-EU seeks Russian energy boost

We've recently heard more veiled threats from Putin about Ukraine being unable to pay for gas (thus presumably leading to new attempts at cutting them off), which suggests that Russia is getting itself ready to start a new crisis.