Environment
Beware the “Investment”!
A crash-course in economic literacy as the AI bubble gets blown up with hot air and public funding I recently learnt that a $20 ChatGPT subscription gets you access to about $700 worth of computing power.1 This inspired two ideas: WOW, I’d better turn my whole camera roll into Studio Ghibli-style remakes before this awesome…
Read MoreWe Built the Technosphere. Now We Must Resist It
Our brave new world of plastic, wire and concrete promises liberation. Instead, its cult of efficiency controls and kills. “People will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.” — Aldous Huxley In the 19th century the Austrian geologist Eduard Suess hiked the Alps to study rock formations…
Read MoreBicycles and Localization
World Celebration Days are ways to highlight a cause, to collectively focus and bring important ideas to public attention at the community level while uniting globally behind them. Several important days were packed into the month of June. These included World Bicycle Day, followed two days later by World Environment Day, and then World Localization…
Read MoreHow the ‘Green Economy’ Exacerbates Deforestation in Brazil
In the ‘green economy,’ the interests of corporations, governments and the conservation industry intersect. All of these entities, in one way or another, profit from the destruction of forests and the dispossession of communities. The REDD mechanism (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation) is a key element of the Green Economy, despite the fact…
Read MoreYard to Table: Building a Local Wood Economy
Inside the Washington, DC beltway – a densely populated area of roughly 20 by 20 miles – trees removed due to disease, death, and development contained 200 million board feet of usable lumber in 2008. That’s enough wood to frame more than 12,000 homes of 2,000 square feet each.[1] But instead, nearly all of it…
Read MoreWhy we must abolish the Energy Charter Treaty
Greta Thunberg made international headlines this week when she and other climate activists were briefly detained by police at a protest against the expansion of a coal mine in Germany. Thunberg was among the thousands of protesters who arrived to denounce the expansion of the huge Garzweiler open-cast lignite mine by German energy company RWE.…
Read MoreTaking pensions out of financial markets
Labor unions and social movements in Brazil have been fighting a pitched battle to stop their far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro, from pursuing his drive to privatize many of the country’s most important public assets. But last year they suffered a major defeat when Bolsanaro’s government sold off the nation’s largest public water utility to a…
Read MoreThe food shortage solution in your backyard
A confluence of crises – lockdowns and business closures, mandates and worker shortages, supply chain disruptions and inflation, sanctions and war – have compounded to trigger food shortages; and we have been warned that they may last longer than the food stored in our pantries. What to do? Jim Gale, founder of Food Forest Abundance,…
Read MoreThe dirty truth about clean energy
Everyone knows what needs to be done to bring down CO2 levels; pump less of it into the atmosphere. But instead of reducing overall energy consumption, the focus is on increasing ‘green’ energy consumption: electric vehicles, massive electric storage installations, solar ‘farms’ and monster wind turbines. More consumption to cure the cancer of overconsumption. Ah,…
Read MoreThe inner dimension of climate adaptation
Capitalism in its earliest incarnation dates back to the end of Europe’s medieval period. ‘Growth’, such as it was, first manifested itself in the innovation and creativity of the Renaissance, while economic expansion in the commonly understood sense was to come later. The commercial revolution of the 16th century, the scientific breakthroughs of the 17th…
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