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What would life be like after peak oil?
25 November 2007 Richard Heinberg warned that the lives of billions of people were threatened by a food crisis caused by our dependence on dwindling supplies of fossil fuels.
Higher oil prices, the loss of farmland to biofuel crops,* climate change and the loss of natural resources would combine with population growth to create an unprecedented food shortage, he claimed.
The only way to avoid a world food crisis was a planned and rapid reduction of fossil fuel use - oil, coal and gas - and a switch to more organic methods in the growing and delivery of food. It would mean a return to living off the land not seen for 150 years.
The stark predictions were made by Heinberg in a lecture to the Soil Association in London.
Heinberg said what was needed was a return to ecological organic farming methods which would require the transformation of societies.
And with oil supplies rapidly running out the full resources of national governments would be needed to achieve it.
The amount of food transportation would have to be reduced, food would need to be grown in and around cities, and producers and consumers would need to live closer together.
Post-peak-oil conditions would reverse globalization, forcing a return to intensely local agriculture and local manufacturing. The stores and services that communities need in order to carry on everyday life would emerge in neighborhoods, as in the pre-automobile era. Cities would empty out, with rural areas and small towns in agriculturally rich areas reviving. Culturally, all Americans would have to undergo a Great Relearning of skills and social habits that our ancestors developed to survive in community.
The use of pesticides would have to be reduced in packaging and processing, draft animals would be reintroduced and governments would have to provide incentives for people to return to an agricultural life. Land reform would be needed to enable smallholders and farming co-ops to work their own plots and population growth would have to be curbed.
"All of this constitutes a gargantuan task, but the alternatives - doing nothing or attempting to solve our food-production problems simply by applying mere techno-fixes - will almost certainly lead to dire consequences," he said.
Cars would be an unaffordable luxury for most, making life in suburbia difficult, perhaps impossible, to sustain. Likewise, air travel and shipping likely would be sharply curtailed as too costly.
Truck transport, too, would diminish, causing a sharp slowdown in the consumer economy and, crucially, making the kind of grocery-store bounty we now enjoy a thing of the past. And with a general rise in energy costs blasting electric bills into the stratosphere, we may all have to get used to - wait for it - life without air conditioning.
Jeffrey Brown, a Richardson geologist who has been active in the peak-oil debate, advises far-sighted folks to abandon the outlying suburbs and exurbs and move closer to the city center. "The smart money has been moving in," he said. "The closer you are to job centers, the more stable the property values have been. That will continue."
Our sons probably would be sent overseas to fight resource wars. Back home, regions of America where tens of millions of people live will be uninhabitable - especially the Southwest and much of suburbia.
The economic contraction and social dislocation will be, in many cases, nothing short of catastrophic and will produce political upheaval. Radical conditions easily could produce radicalism.
http://www.truthout.org/issues_06/112607EA.shtml
* http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml;jsessionid=
0PX0IU5SN0B3FQFIQMFSFGGAVCBQ0IV0?xml=
/earth/2007/06/29/eabio129.xml
Buried 60 Minutes interview with
Former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill says President Bush sought to invade Iraq from the start of his presidency....
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mWkGhV3PsLo
Congress, Courts Examine "State Secrets"
26 November 2007: Washington - In federal courts and on Capitol Hill, challenges are brewing to a key legal strategy President Bush is using to protect a secret surveillance program that monitors phone calls and e-mails inside the United States.
Under grilling from lawmakers and attack by lawsuits alleging Bush authorized the illegal wiretapping of Americans, the White House has invoked a legal defense known as the "state secrets" doctrine - a claim that the president has inherent and unchecked power to shield national security information from disclosure, either to plaintiffs in court or to congressional overseers.
Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, the senior Republican on the Judiciary Committee, believes the White House has gone too far in invoking state secrets to halt civil lawsuits. "We have the authority to define the state secrets doctrine," Specter says.
Specter, Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., and others are working on legislation that would direct federal judges to review the president's state secrets claims and allow cases with merit to go forward.
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/112607E.shtml
Secret Cellphone tracking warrants granted without probable cause
23 November 2007: Federal officials are routinely asking courts to order cellphone companies to furnish real-time tracking data so they can pinpoint the whereabouts of drug traffickers, fugitives and other criminal suspects, according to judges and industry lawyers.
In some cases, judges have granted the requests without requiring the government to demonstrate that there is probable cause to believe that a crime is taking place or that the inquiry will yield evidence of a crime. Privacy advocates fear such a practice may expose average Americans to a new level of government scrutiny of their daily lives.
In many cases, orders are being issued for cell-tower site data, which are less precise than the data derived from E911 signals. Cell-tower site data give an area that could range from about three to 300 square miles vs. the exact building.
"Permitting surreptitious conversion of a cellphone into a tracking device without probable cause raises serious Fourth Amendment concerns especially when the phone is in a house or other place where privacy is reasonably expected," said Judge Stephen William Smith of the Southern District of Texas, whose 2005 opinion on the matter was among the first published.
The requests and orders are sealed at the government's request, so it is difficult to know how often the orders are issued or denied.
To guard against abuse, Congress should require comprehensive reporting to the court and to Congress about how and how often the emergency authority is used, said John Morris, senior counsel for the Center for Democracy and Technology.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/11/22/AR2007112201444.html
Flight Logs Reveal Secret Rendition
25 November 2007 Last week, Europe's leading watchdog on human rights alleged that European countries had breached the international convention against torture by giving the US secret permission to use its airspace.
Thomas Hammarberg, the Council of Europe's commissioner for human rights, said: "What happened at Guantanamo was torture and it is illegal to provide facilities or anything to make this torture possible. Under the law, European governments should have intervened and should not have given permission to let these flights happen."
Gomes added: "It's clear to me that Guantanamo could not have been created without the involvement of European countries."
Methods used at Guantanamo Bay, condemned by Britain's Court of Appeal as a legal "black hole" and as a "monstrous failure of justice" by one law lord, have included the prolonged use of isolation, sleep deprivation, and use of stress positions. "These are methods that have been declared as unlawful by the European Court of Human Rights," Hammarberg said.
Stafford Smith added: "Some European governments, it's now clear, systematically assisted in clandestine flights and illegal prisoner transfers to Guantanamo Bay. We need a full investigation and Europeans need to face their responsibility for these crimes."
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/112607R.shtml
--------------
US Government Failed to Study Tainted Water
The House Energy and Commerce Committee is demanding to know why federal regulators failed to assess potential public health damage from extremely high levels of a toxic industrial solvent found in Southern California drinking water before the mid-1980s.
Trichloroethylene, widely used in the defense industry, was discovered in aquifers under the San Gabriel and San Fernando valleys, which supplied drinking water to nearly 2 million residents. Across the nation, the chemical is one of the most widespread water contaminants.
A letter sent today to the chief of the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry by the House Energy and Commerce Committee said the agency failed to conduct the recommended health evaluations in communities across the nation, an apparent lapse that went unnoticed for more than a decade.
"We are concerned that the agency has failed to complete or act on health recommendations and studies," Rep. Joe Barton (R-Texas), ranking member of the committee.
Barton's staff believes that an exhaustive health review could alert residents who might have been contaminated to get annual health screening and that early medical intervention could save significant numbers of lives.
More than 30 square miles of the San Gabriel Valley, about 18% of it, lie in one of four Superfund sites in which the main contaminants are TCE and its close chemical cousin perchloroethylene, a dry-cleaning agent. Much of the contamination was traced to defense contractors.
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/112607S.shtml
Labor Party wins big in Australia
SYDNEY, Australia - Conservative Prime Minister John Howard, one of the Bush administration's staunchest allies, suffered a humiliating election defeat Saturday at the hands of an opposition leader who has vowed to pull troops out of Iraq.
Labor leader Kevin Rudd, a Chinese-speaking former diplomat, has also promised to sign the Kyoto Protocol on global warming, leaving the U.S. as the only industrialized country not to have joined it.
An Australian Broadcasting Corp. analysis showed that Labor would get at least 81 places in the 150-seat lower house of Parliament — a clear majority.
Despite Rudd's stances on Iraq and climate change, little else was expected to change in Australia's trade and economic policies.
Rudd has pledged to govern as an "economic conservative," while pouring money into schools and universities. He will curtail sweeping industrial reform laws that were perceived to hand bosses too much power.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20071124/ap_on_re_au_an/australia_election
In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit for research and educational purposes. MY NEWSLETTER has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is MY NEWSLETTER endorsed or sponsored by the originator.
Due to Presidential Executive Orders, the National Security Agency may read this email without warning, warrant, or notice. They may do this without any judicial or legislative oversight. You have no recourse or protection and everything you type may be used against you to detain you in a secret prison.
What would life be like after peak oil?
25 November 2007 Richard Heinberg warned that the lives of billions of people were threatened by a food crisis caused by our dependence on dwindling supplies of fossil fuels.
Higher oil prices, the loss of farmland to biofuel crops,* climate change and the loss of natural resources would combine with population growth to create an unprecedented food shortage, he claimed.
The only way to avoid a world food crisis was a planned and rapid reduction of fossil fuel use - oil, coal and gas - and a switch to more organic methods in the growing and delivery of food. It would mean a return to living off the land not seen for 150 years.
The stark predictions were made by Heinberg in a lecture to the Soil Association in London.
Heinberg said what was needed was a return to ecological organic farming methods which would require the transformation of societies.
And with oil supplies rapidly running out the full resources of national governments would be needed to achieve it.
The amount of food transportation would have to be reduced, food would need to be grown in and around cities, and producers and consumers would need to live closer together.
Post-peak-oil conditions would reverse globalization, forcing a return to intensely local agriculture and local manufacturing. The stores and services that communities need in order to carry on everyday life would emerge in neighborhoods, as in the pre-automobile era. Cities would empty out, with rural areas and small towns in agriculturally rich areas reviving. Culturally, all Americans would have to undergo a Great Relearning of skills and social habits that our ancestors developed to survive in community.
The use of pesticides would have to be reduced in packaging and processing, draft animals would be reintroduced and governments would have to provide incentives for people to return to an agricultural life. Land reform would be needed to enable smallholders and farming co-ops to work their own plots and population growth would have to be curbed.
"All of this constitutes a gargantuan task, but the alternatives - doing nothing or attempting to solve our food-production problems simply by applying mere techno-fixes - will almost certainly lead to dire consequences," he said.
Cars would be an unaffordable luxury for most, making life in suburbia difficult, perhaps impossible, to sustain. Likewise, air travel and shipping likely would be sharply curtailed as too costly.
Truck transport, too, would diminish, causing a sharp slowdown in the consumer economy and, crucially, making the kind of grocery-store bounty we now enjoy a thing of the past. And with a general rise in energy costs blasting electric bills into the stratosphere, we may all have to get used to - wait for it - life without air conditioning.
Jeffrey Brown, a Richardson geologist who has been active in the peak-oil debate, advises far-sighted folks to abandon the outlying suburbs and exurbs and move closer to the city center. "The smart money has been moving in," he said. "The closer you are to job centers, the more stable the property values have been. That will continue."
Our sons probably would be sent overseas to fight resource wars. Back home, regions of America where tens of millions of people live will be uninhabitable - especially the Southwest and much of suburbia.
The economic contraction and social dislocation will be, in many cases, nothing short of catastrophic and will produce political upheaval. Radical conditions easily could produce radicalism.
http://www.truthout.org/issues_06/112607EA.shtml
* http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml;jsessionid=
0PX0IU5SN0B3FQFIQMFSFGGAVCBQ0IV0?xml=
/earth/2007/06/29/eabio129.xml
Buried 60 Minutes interview with
Former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill says President Bush sought to invade Iraq from the start of his presidency....
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mWkGhV3PsLo
Congress, Courts Examine "State Secrets"
26 November 2007: Washington - In federal courts and on Capitol Hill, challenges are brewing to a key legal strategy President Bush is using to protect a secret surveillance program that monitors phone calls and e-mails inside the United States.
Under grilling from lawmakers and attack by lawsuits alleging Bush authorized the illegal wiretapping of Americans, the White House has invoked a legal defense known as the "state secrets" doctrine - a claim that the president has inherent and unchecked power to shield national security information from disclosure, either to plaintiffs in court or to congressional overseers.
Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, the senior Republican on the Judiciary Committee, believes the White House has gone too far in invoking state secrets to halt civil lawsuits. "We have the authority to define the state secrets doctrine," Specter says.
Specter, Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., and others are working on legislation that would direct federal judges to review the president's state secrets claims and allow cases with merit to go forward.
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/112607E.shtml
Secret Cellphone tracking warrants granted without probable cause
23 November 2007: Federal officials are routinely asking courts to order cellphone companies to furnish real-time tracking data so they can pinpoint the whereabouts of drug traffickers, fugitives and other criminal suspects, according to judges and industry lawyers.
In some cases, judges have granted the requests without requiring the government to demonstrate that there is probable cause to believe that a crime is taking place or that the inquiry will yield evidence of a crime. Privacy advocates fear such a practice may expose average Americans to a new level of government scrutiny of their daily lives.
In many cases, orders are being issued for cell-tower site data, which are less precise than the data derived from E911 signals. Cell-tower site data give an area that could range from about three to 300 square miles vs. the exact building.
"Permitting surreptitious conversion of a cellphone into a tracking device without probable cause raises serious Fourth Amendment concerns especially when the phone is in a house or other place where privacy is reasonably expected," said Judge Stephen William Smith of the Southern District of Texas, whose 2005 opinion on the matter was among the first published.
The requests and orders are sealed at the government's request, so it is difficult to know how often the orders are issued or denied.
To guard against abuse, Congress should require comprehensive reporting to the court and to Congress about how and how often the emergency authority is used, said John Morris, senior counsel for the Center for Democracy and Technology.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/11/22/AR2007112201444.html
Flight Logs Reveal Secret Rendition
25 November 2007 Last week, Europe's leading watchdog on human rights alleged that European countries had breached the international convention against torture by giving the US secret permission to use its airspace.
Thomas Hammarberg, the Council of Europe's commissioner for human rights, said: "What happened at Guantanamo was torture and it is illegal to provide facilities or anything to make this torture possible. Under the law, European governments should have intervened and should not have given permission to let these flights happen."
Gomes added: "It's clear to me that Guantanamo could not have been created without the involvement of European countries."
Methods used at Guantanamo Bay, condemned by Britain's Court of Appeal as a legal "black hole" and as a "monstrous failure of justice" by one law lord, have included the prolonged use of isolation, sleep deprivation, and use of stress positions. "These are methods that have been declared as unlawful by the European Court of Human Rights," Hammarberg said.
Stafford Smith added: "Some European governments, it's now clear, systematically assisted in clandestine flights and illegal prisoner transfers to Guantanamo Bay. We need a full investigation and Europeans need to face their responsibility for these crimes."
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/112607R.shtml
--------------
US Government Failed to Study Tainted Water
The House Energy and Commerce Committee is demanding to know why federal regulators failed to assess potential public health damage from extremely high levels of a toxic industrial solvent found in Southern California drinking water before the mid-1980s.
Trichloroethylene, widely used in the defense industry, was discovered in aquifers under the San Gabriel and San Fernando valleys, which supplied drinking water to nearly 2 million residents. Across the nation, the chemical is one of the most widespread water contaminants.
A letter sent today to the chief of the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry by the House Energy and Commerce Committee said the agency failed to conduct the recommended health evaluations in communities across the nation, an apparent lapse that went unnoticed for more than a decade.
"We are concerned that the agency has failed to complete or act on health recommendations and studies," Rep. Joe Barton (R-Texas), ranking member of the committee.
Barton's staff believes that an exhaustive health review could alert residents who might have been contaminated to get annual health screening and that early medical intervention could save significant numbers of lives.
More than 30 square miles of the San Gabriel Valley, about 18% of it, lie in one of four Superfund sites in which the main contaminants are TCE and its close chemical cousin perchloroethylene, a dry-cleaning agent. Much of the contamination was traced to defense contractors.
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/112607S.shtml
Labor Party wins big in Australia
SYDNEY, Australia - Conservative Prime Minister John Howard, one of the Bush administration's staunchest allies, suffered a humiliating election defeat Saturday at the hands of an opposition leader who has vowed to pull troops out of Iraq.
Labor leader Kevin Rudd, a Chinese-speaking former diplomat, has also promised to sign the Kyoto Protocol on global warming, leaving the U.S. as the only industrialized country not to have joined it.
An Australian Broadcasting Corp. analysis showed that Labor would get at least 81 places in the 150-seat lower house of Parliament — a clear majority.
Despite Rudd's stances on Iraq and climate change, little else was expected to change in Australia's trade and economic policies.
Rudd has pledged to govern as an "economic conservative," while pouring money into schools and universities. He will curtail sweeping industrial reform laws that were perceived to hand bosses too much power.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20071124/ap_on_re_au_an/australia_election
In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit for research and educational purposes. MY NEWSLETTER has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is MY NEWSLETTER endorsed or sponsored by the originator.
Due to Presidential Executive Orders, the National Security Agency may read this email without warning, warrant, or notice. They may do this without any judicial or legislative oversight. You have no recourse or protection and everything you type may be used against you to detain you in a secret prison.
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