Holidays as a benchmark

Reflection

Another holiday season is behind us. As I reflect on mine, I get a strong sense that holidays can be seen as a sort of benchmark. We tend to remember certain traditions and how they played out throughout the years. On needles and pins Take the Christmas tree, for example. Let’s face it, there's nothing that can bring out the worst in any of us than the tree. Remember the year that the kids knocked it over? Or, the year that the cat tore all of the ornaments off of the bottom tiers? Or the … [Read more...]

Four things that were better in 1899

Gibson print

It's no accident that the 1960 film adaptation of The Time Machine opens with host HG Wells welcoming four friends to a dinner party in London on January 5, 1900 to recount events that had occurred since he last met them, on New Year's Eve, 1899. What year could be more symbolic of the end of an era, for good or ill, than 1899? Since Americans worship at the altar of progress, we hardly need to be reminded that plenty of things in the 1890s were certainly much worse than they are … [Read more...]

Will 2013 be the year globalization died?

Insourcing American Jobs conference

In The Campaign, last year's hilarious, potty-mouthed political romp with Will Ferrell and Zach Galifianakis, the Motch brothers (modeled of course on the Koch brothers) shovel piles of cash onto the campaign of Galifianakis's character Marty. Why? They want to build factories in his North Carolina congressional district, where they will employ Chinese workers at Chinese wages. They call it "insourcing." The term might sound silly, but in real life insourcing is no joke. For decades, … [Read more...]

Peak oil and climate change: hold your nose and vote

Obama at debate

At last night's third and final presidential debate, we heard about horses and bayonets, nukes and drones, Israel and Iran and whether we should just give up on Pakistan. But, for the first time since 1988, we didn't hear anything last night or in either of the two previous debates this year about climate change. As to energy, it came up much less in last night's foreign policy debate than in the previous week's debate on domestic issues, but anything said on energy was just as … [Read more...]

World made by hand

Letterpress Bike

My friend Cate Fitt, an artist and fellow blogger, shared a video that really blew my mind. It inspired this piece. Thanks Cate! Ink it, don't think it I love of old school printing presses. I love the quality and the raw nature of the medium. I also love that it's done by hand. As a writer and graphic designer, I've long harbored the fantasy that when the world hits the skids after peak oil really delivers its wallop, that I would shift to printing on a local scale. Maybe I'd run a local … [Read more...]

Finger pointing on gas prices — the pink slime of politics

Rove Slime

During this already hyper-bizarre presidential election cycle, Super PAC money is enjoying an unprecedented ability to reach a media-addicted public while being held to virtually no standards of truth. Sadly, donors do all this with a nod-nod wink-wink relationship to the candidates each Super PAC wishes to support. Nowhere is this getting more crazy than on the emerging "gas prices" narrative. Yet nowhere is there a greater opening for deconstruction of this phony narrative, and an … [Read more...]

Magical thinking: Kunstler and Berman on natural gas euphoria

Fracking Cartoon

In Episode #192 of the Kunstlercast which aired February 2nd, James Howard Kunstler and Duncan Crary have done us all a great favor by interviewing noted petroleum geologist, Arthur Berman. Berman’s popular in the peak oil world. In addition to his day job as a petroleum geologist and consultant, he's on the board of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil and an editorial board member of the Oil Drum. He occasionally makes appearances on CNN and maintains his own blog at Petroleum Truth … [Read more...]

Talkin’ peak oil blues: The new KunstlerCast book

Crary and Kunstler

Beloved curmudgeon and peak oil prophet James Howard Kunstler doesn't mince words. Whether it's on his Monday blog, Clusterfuck Nation, in his many public appearances, as a featured commentator in documentaries, or in books like peak oil classic The Long Emergency, Kunstler delivers the bad news straight on. Take his comments in the ABC-TV film Earth 2100: One of our political leaders said, not too long ago, that the American way of life is non-negotiable. And we're gonna discover the hard … [Read more...]

The state of Transition

Transition Network Logo

By now, I assume that most people who read Transition Voice know about the Transition Towns movement. It’s been three years since Rob Hopkins’ seminal book, The Transition Handbook, was published, and put into words what many have sensed for a while: that things will never be the same again. Indeed, they're not. So, I thought that given some advancement in awareness among people (witness the #OccupyWallStreet movement)  it was time to take an (admittedly incomplete) look at where … [Read more...]

What kids today really need to learn

Blackboard Jungle

Recently I sent an e-mail to a couple of local high school teachers who are involved with creating a new online class. One is a history teacher, the other teaches science. They wanted to teach students about “Problems of the 21st Century,” ostensibly to help prepare the next generation for what's ahead. I’m sure they considered climate change one of the “Problems of the 21st Century,” but I thought it would be a good idea to whisper in their ear and encourage them to take on the … [Read more...]