Dorothea Lange Country filling station owned by tobacco farmer, Granville County, NC Jul 1939 I woke up today to a request to comment on an article I hadn’t even read yet at the time. Now, I don’t do requests, but when I saw that it was an article by my favorite nemesis Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, and I read it, I thought alright, let’s have a go. Just this once. Ambrose sings the praise of solar and natural gas in this one,
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Arthur Rothstein Installation of a 30,000 kilowatt generator at Cherokee Dam Jun 1942 There are presidential elections in Turkey today, and current prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan looks set to win. Which means the US will have a definitely uncomfortable bedfellow in the Eastern Europe/Middle East region (the borders between the two are not terribly clear) in the coming years. Erdogan has recently become a very loud opponent of Israel – and all the world’s Jews – , and US
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Jack Delano Migratory farm worker from Florida in her Sunday clothes July 1940 I know I’ve talked about it more than once lately, but at least for now I don’t think it can be said enough. The world energy situation is much worse than you have been, and are being, led to believe. Even if you do understand the principle that underlies peak oil (by no means a given). I’ve also repeatedly made the point that the real energy predicament
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Detroit Publishing 12th Street bascule bridge, Chicago 1900 If we can agree for a moment that there is a very real possibility that we will have both much less capital and less energy available to us in the future, what should we do to define our response to this possibility? The obvious answer would seem to be to scale down, and do that as best we can without causing our societies to crumble because of it. We could take comfort
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My personal view of how communities should manage the production and distribution of their basic necessities is very different from what has become the accepted model in the western world. The running mantra says that private industries are better at anything and everything than governments are, and hence, than communities are. What I think is that even if that were true, and from what I see it’s much more of an ideology than a proven fact, even if it were
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Esther Bubley “BusStop” September 1943 “Idlers in front of the Greyhound bus stop between Memphis and Chattanooga”In the first part of this series,, I talked about rising energy prices in the UK, and the government’s plans to increase supply with yet to be built nuclear plants, for which deals are in the process of concluding with construction largely to be done by a French consortium led by EDF, and financing coming from a range of Chinese investors, who will, if
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Lately, after I’ve written yet another article that focuses on Britain, I pledge to myself that it’ll be the last one for a long while. Only to find that I need to do more, simply because what comes out of Albion is both so nuts and so indicative of what will soon happen in many other places that I can’t afford to not use it as a cautionary tale for people presently living in these ‘other places’. It’s simply about
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We’ve used the analogy before, in particular to describe what happened to the Roman Empire during the latter days of its existence. Looking around various economies in the world today, the same analogy once again comes to mind. One might say that what we see these days is analogous to the more advanced stages of hypothermia. Early hypothermia may show in nothing more than cold feet, in itself an amusing analogy perhaps. But a body that is exposed to extreme
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Russell Lee Dust in the Bakken October 1937 No, I wasn’t going to write a third article on shale in 2 weeks, absolutely not. But what I’ve read these past few days doesn’t leave me much choice. It turns out that the entire plethora of doubts I have raised in Shale Is A Pipedream Sold To Greater Fools and London Is Fracking, And I Live By The River are now also being raised on a larger scale: the media are
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It's a state of mind, a way of thinking and a belief system bordering on outright religion all in one. If it would be recognized as a religion, it would be the world's biggest. Its followers and proponents hold that growth is a necessary element of survival, that technology is capable of solving all problems (especially those caused by mankind), and that the earth, nature, the living environment, is there for mankind to be exploited at will to achieve that
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