Even when you don’t agree with him, Monbiot remains essential reading. Whether you regard the Dark Mountain Project as a bunch of dystopian doomers, or simply realists probably depends on how you feel about peak oil (in the shorter term) and (in the medium term) just exactly what might happen when we do indeed succeed in doubling concentrations of atmospheric CO2 from their pre-industrial levels and usher in, as predicted, a brave new climatic order for the next few millennia… (more…)
Posts Tagged ‘Oil’
Can industrial civilisation and the biosphere both be saved?
Tuesday, May 11th, 2010North East Passage open for business
Wednesday, September 16th, 2009The fabled North West Passage, allowing shipping from Asia to Europe to navigate via the Arctic Ocean, is now routinely used. This passage cost the lives of many earlier expeditions. Times have changed, and a century of relentless global warming has loosened the Arctic’s icy grip.
But the North East Passage? In the last week the first ever commercial shipping have conquered this once impregnable divide. The pace of destruction of the Arctic ice mass is accellerating. This September has seen the third smallest Arctic ice mass ever recorded. The other two years? 2007 and 2008.
Regional climatic circumstances meant early 2009 was unusually cold, yet the late summer melt was almost as bad as it’s ever been. The top of our world may be entirely ice-free within the next few years. One estimate calculates this will have the same albedo-altering effect on global warming as 70% of all the fossil fuels burned in the last two centuries.
Should we be worried? Hell yes. Instead, the US, Canada, Russia and Denmark are licking their chops in anticipation of soon having unfettered access to billions of tons of oil deposits beneath what is now sea ice. It’s a mad, mad world.
Weaning ourselves off the fetish of growth
Thursday, June 12th, 2008A cynic, according to Oscar Wilde, is a person who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. He could have easily been talking about economists. It’s hard to open a newspaper or turn on the radio these days without some economist or other telling us exactly what needs to be done to get ‘the economy moving’ or to achieve ‘more growth’.
And what, you might ask, is wrong with that? For as long as any of us can remember, we’ve been conditioned to believe that the solution to all Ireland’s ills lay in ‘growth’. As the last decade has shown, explosive growth brings damage and disruption as well as undoubted economic benefits to many. (more…)
Let them eat cake
Monday, April 14th, 2008It takes around 230 kg of corn to feed a child in the ‘developing world’ for a year, according to UN estimates. By a ghoulish coincidence, that’s around the same amount of corn as is needed to produce enough biofuel to fill a 50-litre fuel tank on a car – once.
World grain stocks are the lowest they’ve been in 25 years, with just 5 million tons in the kitty, enough for between 8 and 12 weeks. (more…)
There Will Be Oil!
Thursday, February 28th, 2008The prolific American author Upton Sinclair died 40 years ago, but his novel Oil, published in 1927, has recently had a second coming, being the book upon which the Oscar-winning film There Will Be Blood is based.
Another of Sinclair’s pearls was also recently made famous, this time by Al Gore, when he recalled one of the author’s quotations in his film, An Inconvenient Truth. “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it”. (more…)