An energy crisis is running amok right now. A taste of the crisis is: the ever-climbing price of oil and gasoline, truckers being forced to not truck stuff around, airlines going out of business or merging, food riots around the world, etc.
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I was recently watching episodes of Torchwood (second season), a spinoff TV series from the rebirthed Doctor Who series. There was an interesting thought in one episode .. but first, to explain a little .. The Doctor Who genre is science fiction and time travel and saving the world from threats which threaten total destruction. The Torchwood franchise takes one character who had accompanied The Doctor, and plunks him in Cardiff Wales as the backdrop from which to save the world. It's a little farfetched but at the same time, like any creative work, they're able to explore bigger themes.
 | Torchwood - The Complete First Season asin: B000VWE5OY |
The Kindle seems like a pseudo-green technology, in that you can buy books w/o it involving the destruction of trees to make paper and without it involving the oil to drive the book on a truck to your door. It's also an example of the digitization of our cultural assets, a digitization of the lifeblood of our humanity. And it also appears to be an extremely convenient gadget, akin to the iPod but instead of purposed for music the Kindle is purposed for written material.
 | Nineteen Eighty-Four author: George Orwell asin: 0452284236 |
 | 1984 asin: B00007KQA3 |
 | Kindle: Amazon's New Wireless Reading Device asin: B000FI73MA |
I saw No Gas Day May 15th referencing an activist plea posted on http://www.nogasday.com/ .. essentially the plea goes that if we all were to not buy gasoline on a given day, that it would cause a blip which would get the attention of the gas companies, and it would make a big impact on gasoline prices. A bit of yahoogling showed me why this sounded familiar, the same message has been in e-mail chain letters going back to 1999.
American policies were designed for a world economic arrangement of $20 per barrel of oil. Oil is now at $120 per barrel and climbing. There may be, in the short term, a decrease in the price of oil if the short term supply situation straightens itself out. However, long term, the price of oil is only going to go up. As our dear president said, America is Addicted to Oil but like true addicts we haven't even entered the first step in the 12 step program to recovery. We haven't admitted to our addiction and are in deep denial.
 | Energy Crossroads: A burning need to change course, asin: B000SNWA2A |
"Clearly, the world needs a massive amount of carbon-free electricity by 2050 to stabilize greenhouse gas emissions." This is the key of a salon.com article discussing a specific form of energy technology that could very well make a huge difference to our world. Basically, to solve for global warming requires getting to an energy which doesn't have, as a side effect, to cause global warming.
There are many alternative energy technologies which could do this to some extent but might not work so well. For example wind power only produces electricity when the wind is blowing..
In Haiti the food riots were severe enough that a UN "Peacekeeper" was killed, and the Prime Minister was forced to resign.
Over the weekend the more I thought about the food riots the more wrong this seemed. Here are some stories of potential food riots in the Phillipines.
I read this news article immediately after watching an episode of Doctor Who, and it seemed a story that would fit right in. 'A dramatic rise in the worldwide cost of food is provoking riots throughout the Third World where millions more of the world's most vulnerable people are facing starvation as food shortages grow and cereal prices soar.' The article says food riots are occurring in many countries, that the riots are due to rising food prices, and the rising food prices are due to food being diverted to biofuel production.
 | The Not So Big House: A Blueprint for the Way We Really Live author: Sarah Susanka asin: 1561583766 |
 | Creating the Not So Big House: Insights and Ideas for the New American Home author: Sarah Susanka,Grey Crawford asin: B000H305TQ |
The "not so big house" is an antidote to the McMansion complex where people are buying ever-bigger houses and thereby consuming more and more and more. Sarah Susanka of Susanka Studios, author of The Not So Big House, is interviewed in the podcast with Green Living Ideas.
