Showing posts with label environment. Show all posts
Showing posts with label environment. Show all posts
Thursday, June 22, 2017
Saturday, April 29, 2017
Various Tweets: From @postcarbon
How to Do a Food Rescue https://t.co/aLvKLWD5cd (@buildresilience)
— Post Carbon Inst. (@postcarbon) April 28, 2017
Shot: @bradplumer on science/gov't interactions
— D. Ray Long (@RayLongDC) April 26, 2017
Chaser: @HardcoreHistory's history of the early nuclear age https://t.co/HzumOaf7jA https://t.co/Pql6RPnImQ
Juggling Live Hand Grenades: @richardheinberg reviews some important (and worrying) recent articles. https://t.co/vRgjhTdM7C pic.twitter.com/8b3LmBnagM
— Post Carbon Inst. (@postcarbon) April 26, 2017
Many California Sierra Club chapters are now firm opponents of actual urban sustainability and housing justice. https://t.co/QZygXsKGSJ
— Alex Steffen (@AlexSteffen) April 25, 2017
Peak Oil Review – 24 April 2017 https://t.co/h1HFwO7smh (@buildresilience)
— Post Carbon Inst. (@postcarbon) April 24, 2017
Review: Botanical Treasures by Joshua Smith https://t.co/Sb5A2HK5wu (@buildresilience)
— Post Carbon Inst. (@postcarbon) April 24, 2017
"For the most part, renewables don't work on individual or industrial level. Village-level use does" https://t.co/vyiJBFOAcm via @postcarbon
— Craig Morris (@PPchef) April 22, 2017
Tuesday, June 14, 2016
Friday, April 22, 2016
Monday, September 14, 2015
Friday, May 02, 2014
Saturday, February 08, 2014
Sunday, November 24, 2013
Century's End
Five writers, including Kunstler, predict the state of things at the end of the century.
Wednesday, November 20, 2013
Wednesday, September 18, 2013
Colorado Flooding and Hilo Sprawl: A Potential Essay
This morning I left a comment at Hattie's post about the Colorado flood and the words just flowed. I may develop the comment into a short essay here. The popular image of global warming, of melting ice caps and the subsequent flooding of coastal areas, enables complacency among those who live inland, especially in mountainous regions like Colorado. But the effects of climate change are not yet fully known, and some, like more severe snowstorms, appear to discredit its very existence in the eyes of deniers and skeptics.
I noted the inland movement of Hilo, not as a precaution against rising sea levels, but as a result of two tsunamis that destroyed swaths of coastal Hilo. Post-1960 development in particular occurred after the advent of mass motoring. Wide, multilane highways and vast parking lots discourage walking.
In my comment, I mentioned this piece by Alain de Botton, on a world without planes. My plan is to research the effect of mass aviation on the environment.
And here's a not-too-recent but still informative article on aviation and greenhouse gas emissions.
Wikipedia has an excellent
article on the environmental impact of aviation.
20 September update: There's much to write about. I'll post some more on Hilo's development and its tendency toward sprawl, and maybe on the Hilo airport, and what happened when the Kona International Airport opened. This will all take a while, but it should clarify the recent history of Hilo. For one thing, why is the Waiakea Villas all run down, when in the early eighties, it was thriving? Did you know Hilo had direct flights from the mainland? This post is basically writing things down, before I organize it into something coherent.
29 September update: Statistics on airplane emissions.
I noted the inland movement of Hilo, not as a precaution against rising sea levels, but as a result of two tsunamis that destroyed swaths of coastal Hilo. Post-1960 development in particular occurred after the advent of mass motoring. Wide, multilane highways and vast parking lots discourage walking.
In my comment, I mentioned this piece by Alain de Botton, on a world without planes. My plan is to research the effect of mass aviation on the environment.
And here's a not-too-recent but still informative article on aviation and greenhouse gas emissions.
Wikipedia has an excellent
article on the environmental impact of aviation.
20 September update: There's much to write about. I'll post some more on Hilo's development and its tendency toward sprawl, and maybe on the Hilo airport, and what happened when the Kona International Airport opened. This will all take a while, but it should clarify the recent history of Hilo. For one thing, why is the Waiakea Villas all run down, when in the early eighties, it was thriving? Did you know Hilo had direct flights from the mainland? This post is basically writing things down, before I organize it into something coherent.
29 September update: Statistics on airplane emissions.
Thursday, August 29, 2013
Thursday, June 14, 2012
Tuesday, June 05, 2012
Thursday, May 31, 2012
How I First Heard About Peak Oil
Nearly seven years ago, I saw a movie on fX called Oil Storm. This is how I first heard about peak oil. A few months later Shepherd Bliss gave a presentation on peak oil*. Among the books he had on display was Kunstler's The Long Emergency. Reading that book deepened my interest.
*Rising Gas Prices And
Dwindling Oil Supplies
By Dr. Shepherd Bliss
Sept. 28th Wednesday 12:00pm CC313
Sept. 29th Thursday 7:00pm CC301
This presentation will look beneath this symptom to consider a deeper problem—the rising demand for oil products, and the decreasing supply of the non-renewable fossil fuel petroleum.
Hawaiÿi’s situation within the global economy of oil will be explored, including data on oil company profits. Hurricane Katrina and its devastating impact will be considered, in the context of global warming, the likelihood of more such disasters,
and how they might hit Hawaiÿi. A discussion will follow the presentation.
Information from sb3@pon.net.
Sponsors: Global HOPE
*Rising Gas Prices And
Dwindling Oil Supplies
By Dr. Shepherd Bliss
Sept. 28th Wednesday 12:00pm CC313
Sept. 29th Thursday 7:00pm CC301
This presentation will look beneath this symptom to consider a deeper problem—the rising demand for oil products, and the decreasing supply of the non-renewable fossil fuel petroleum.
Hawaiÿi’s situation within the global economy of oil will be explored, including data on oil company profits. Hurricane Katrina and its devastating impact will be considered, in the context of global warming, the likelihood of more such disasters,
and how they might hit Hawaiÿi. A discussion will follow the presentation.
Information from sb3@pon.net.
Sponsors: Global HOPE
Tuesday, March 20, 2012
Monday, January 16, 2012
Death in the Amazon
I found this at twitter.com/maxblumenthal
Loggers burned Amazon tribe girl alive.
The Amazon rainforest isn't featured as prominently as it was twenty years ago, but the destruction continues.
Loggers burned Amazon tribe girl alive.
The Amazon rainforest isn't featured as prominently as it was twenty years ago, but the destruction continues.
Thursday, December 15, 2011
Tuesday, December 06, 2011
FERN: Food and Environment Reporting Network
is a new nonprofit journalism organization about food and the environment.
Monday, November 16, 2009
Kunstler Back in Fine Form
I had some computer problems so I was effectively offline for two weeks. Catching up, I found Kunstler's latest column, one of the best he's written in ages.
The Fate of the Yeast People
By James Howard Kunstler
on November 16, 2009 6:16 AM
Every time I do a Q and A after a college lecture, somebody says (with a fanfare of indignation) - so as to reveal their own brilliance in contrast to my foolishness - "You haven't said anything about overpopulation!"
Right. I usually don't bother. Their complaint, of course, implies that we would do something about overpopulation if only we would recognize it. Which is absurd. What might we do about overpopulation here in the USA? Legislate a one-child policy? Set up an onerous set of bureaucratic protocols forcing citizens to apply for permission to reproduce? Direct the police to shoot all female babies? Use stimulus money to build crematoria outside of Nashville?
It's certainly true that the planet is suffering from human population overshoot. We're way beyond "carrying capacity." Only the remaining supplies of fossil fuels allow us to continue this process, and not for long, anyway. In the meantime, human reproduction rates are also greatly increasing the supply of idiots relative to resources, and that is especially problematic in the USA, where idiots rule the culture and polity.
The cocoon of normality prevents us from appreciating how peculiar and special recent times have been in this country. We suppose, tautologically, that because things have always seemed the way they are, that they always have been the way they seem. The collective human imagination is a treacherous place.
I'm fascinated by the dominion of moron culture in the USA, in everything from the way we inhabit the landscape - the fiasco of suburbia - to the way we feed ourselves - an endless megatonnage of microwaved Velveeta and corn byproducts - along with the popular entertainment offerings of Reality TV, the Nascar ovals, and the gigantic evangelical church shows beloved in the Heartland. To evangelize a bit myself, if such a concept as "an offense in the sight of God" has any meaning, then the way we conduct ourselves in this land is surely the epitome of it - though this is hardly an advertisement for competing religions, who are well-supplied with morons, too.
Moron culture in the USA really got full traction after the Second World War. Our victory over the other industrial powers in that struggle was so total and stupendous that the laboring orders here were raised up to economic levels unknown by any peasantry in human history. People who had been virtual serfs trailing cotton sacks in the sunstroke belt a generation back were suddenly living better than Renaissance dukes, laved in air-conditioning, banqueting on "TV dinners," motoring on a whim to places that would have taken a three-day mule trek in their grandaddy's day. Soon, they were buying Buick dealerships and fried chicken franchises and opening banks and building leisure kingdoms of thrill rides and football. It's hard to overstate the fantastic wealth that a not-very-bright cohort of human beings was able to accumulate in post-war America.
And they were able to express themselves - as the great chronicler of these things, Tom Wolfe, has described so often and well - in exuberant "taste cultures" of material life, of which Las Vegas is probably the final summing-up, and every highway strip, of twenty-thousand strips from Maine to Oregon, is the democratic example. These days, I travel the road up the west shore of Lake George, in Warren County, New York, and see the sad, decomposing relics of that culture and that time in all the "playful" motels and leisure-time attractions, with their cracked plastic signs advertising the very things that they exterminated in the quest for adequate parking - the woodand vistas, the paddling Mohicans, the wolf, the moose, the catamount - and I take a certain serene comfort in the knowledge that it is all over now for this stuff and the class of morons that produced it.
A very close friend of mine calls them "the yeast people." They were the democratic masses who thrived in the great fermentation vat of the post World War Two economy. They are now meeting the fate that any yeast population faces when the fermentation process is complete. For the moment, they are only ceasing to thrive. They are suffering and worrying horribly from the threat that there might be no further fermentation. The brewers running the vat try to assure them that there's more sugar left in the mix, and more beer can be made from it, and more yeasts can be brought into this world to enjoy the life of the sweet, moist mash. In fact, one of the brewers did happen to dump about a trillion-and-a-half teaspoons of sugar into the vat during 2009, and that has produced an illusion of further fermentation. But we know all too well that this artificial stimulus has limits.
What will happen to the yeast people of the USA? You can be sure that the outcome will not yield to "policies" and "protocols." The economy that produced all that amazing wealth is contracting, and pretty rapidly, too, and the numbers among the yeast will naturally follow the downward arc of the story. Entropy is a harsh mistress. In the immediate offing: a contest for the table scraps of the 20th century. We've barely seen the beginning of this, just a little peevishness embodied by yeast shaman figures such as Sarah Palin and Glen Beck. As hardships mount and hardened emotions rise, we'll see "the usual suspects" come into play: starvation, disease, violence. We may still be driving around in Ford F-150s, but the Pale Rider is just over the horizon beating a path to our parking-lot-of-the-soul.
It's a sad and tragic process and, all lame metaphors aside, there are real human feelings at stake in our prospects for loss of every kind, but especially in the fate of people we love. The human race has known catastrophe before and come through it. There's some credible opinion that "this time it's different" but who really knows? We have our 2012 apocalypse movies. The people of the 14th century, savaged by the Black Death, had their woodcuts of dancing skeletons. Feudalism was wiped out in that earlier calamity but, whaddaya know, less than a century after that the Renaissance emerged in a wholly new culture of cities. Maybe we will emerge from our culture of free parking to a new society of living, by necessity, much more lightly on the planet and for a long time, perhaps long enough to allow the terrain to recover from all the free parking.
The Fate of the Yeast People
By James Howard Kunstler
on November 16, 2009 6:16 AM
Every time I do a Q and A after a college lecture, somebody says (with a fanfare of indignation) - so as to reveal their own brilliance in contrast to my foolishness - "You haven't said anything about overpopulation!"
Right. I usually don't bother. Their complaint, of course, implies that we would do something about overpopulation if only we would recognize it. Which is absurd. What might we do about overpopulation here in the USA? Legislate a one-child policy? Set up an onerous set of bureaucratic protocols forcing citizens to apply for permission to reproduce? Direct the police to shoot all female babies? Use stimulus money to build crematoria outside of Nashville?
It's certainly true that the planet is suffering from human population overshoot. We're way beyond "carrying capacity." Only the remaining supplies of fossil fuels allow us to continue this process, and not for long, anyway. In the meantime, human reproduction rates are also greatly increasing the supply of idiots relative to resources, and that is especially problematic in the USA, where idiots rule the culture and polity.
The cocoon of normality prevents us from appreciating how peculiar and special recent times have been in this country. We suppose, tautologically, that because things have always seemed the way they are, that they always have been the way they seem. The collective human imagination is a treacherous place.
I'm fascinated by the dominion of moron culture in the USA, in everything from the way we inhabit the landscape - the fiasco of suburbia - to the way we feed ourselves - an endless megatonnage of microwaved Velveeta and corn byproducts - along with the popular entertainment offerings of Reality TV, the Nascar ovals, and the gigantic evangelical church shows beloved in the Heartland. To evangelize a bit myself, if such a concept as "an offense in the sight of God" has any meaning, then the way we conduct ourselves in this land is surely the epitome of it - though this is hardly an advertisement for competing religions, who are well-supplied with morons, too.
Moron culture in the USA really got full traction after the Second World War. Our victory over the other industrial powers in that struggle was so total and stupendous that the laboring orders here were raised up to economic levels unknown by any peasantry in human history. People who had been virtual serfs trailing cotton sacks in the sunstroke belt a generation back were suddenly living better than Renaissance dukes, laved in air-conditioning, banqueting on "TV dinners," motoring on a whim to places that would have taken a three-day mule trek in their grandaddy's day. Soon, they were buying Buick dealerships and fried chicken franchises and opening banks and building leisure kingdoms of thrill rides and football. It's hard to overstate the fantastic wealth that a not-very-bright cohort of human beings was able to accumulate in post-war America.
And they were able to express themselves - as the great chronicler of these things, Tom Wolfe, has described so often and well - in exuberant "taste cultures" of material life, of which Las Vegas is probably the final summing-up, and every highway strip, of twenty-thousand strips from Maine to Oregon, is the democratic example. These days, I travel the road up the west shore of Lake George, in Warren County, New York, and see the sad, decomposing relics of that culture and that time in all the "playful" motels and leisure-time attractions, with their cracked plastic signs advertising the very things that they exterminated in the quest for adequate parking - the woodand vistas, the paddling Mohicans, the wolf, the moose, the catamount - and I take a certain serene comfort in the knowledge that it is all over now for this stuff and the class of morons that produced it.
A very close friend of mine calls them "the yeast people." They were the democratic masses who thrived in the great fermentation vat of the post World War Two economy. They are now meeting the fate that any yeast population faces when the fermentation process is complete. For the moment, they are only ceasing to thrive. They are suffering and worrying horribly from the threat that there might be no further fermentation. The brewers running the vat try to assure them that there's more sugar left in the mix, and more beer can be made from it, and more yeasts can be brought into this world to enjoy the life of the sweet, moist mash. In fact, one of the brewers did happen to dump about a trillion-and-a-half teaspoons of sugar into the vat during 2009, and that has produced an illusion of further fermentation. But we know all too well that this artificial stimulus has limits.
What will happen to the yeast people of the USA? You can be sure that the outcome will not yield to "policies" and "protocols." The economy that produced all that amazing wealth is contracting, and pretty rapidly, too, and the numbers among the yeast will naturally follow the downward arc of the story. Entropy is a harsh mistress. In the immediate offing: a contest for the table scraps of the 20th century. We've barely seen the beginning of this, just a little peevishness embodied by yeast shaman figures such as Sarah Palin and Glen Beck. As hardships mount and hardened emotions rise, we'll see "the usual suspects" come into play: starvation, disease, violence. We may still be driving around in Ford F-150s, but the Pale Rider is just over the horizon beating a path to our parking-lot-of-the-soul.
It's a sad and tragic process and, all lame metaphors aside, there are real human feelings at stake in our prospects for loss of every kind, but especially in the fate of people we love. The human race has known catastrophe before and come through it. There's some credible opinion that "this time it's different" but who really knows? We have our 2012 apocalypse movies. The people of the 14th century, savaged by the Black Death, had their woodcuts of dancing skeletons. Feudalism was wiped out in that earlier calamity but, whaddaya know, less than a century after that the Renaissance emerged in a wholly new culture of cities. Maybe we will emerge from our culture of free parking to a new society of living, by necessity, much more lightly on the planet and for a long time, perhaps long enough to allow the terrain to recover from all the free parking.
Tuesday, June 09, 2009
Brace Yourselves
says this.
However:
However:
While much of the world will be roasting (he prefers the term "global heating"), there will be a few oases to weather out the storm, he says. Island nations, such as his own Britain as well as New Zealand, Ireland and Hawaii, will do fine thanks to the moderating effects of oceans and their rainstorms. Ditto for currently cold northern areas, including parts of Canada and Siberia, which will gain a more hospitable climate.
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