Thinking Globally: ‘Living Planet Report 2012’ - Ecological Footprint Index

From WWF:

‎”The Living Planet Report is the world’s leading, science-based analysis on the health of our only planet and the impact of human activity. Its key finding? Humanity’s demands exceed our planet’s capacity to sustain us.” 

You can find your country and see how it compares to others using the interactive Eco Footprint calculator above. 

Related:

~ ‘How to be a conscious consumer’ (WWF)

~ ‘Earth’s environment getting worse, not better, says WWF ahead of Rio+20’ (The Guardian)

Three paragraphs from Thomas Homer-Dixon’s recent article in the Globe & Mail, ‘All’s not lost, Ontario. The future is green, not black’. Homer-Dixon is the director of the Waterloo Institute for Complexity and Innovation and the author of a number of books including, ‘Carbon Shift: How the Twin Crises of Oil Depletion and Climate Change Will Define the Future’, ‘The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity and the Renewal of Civilization’, and ‘The Ingenuity Gap’. You can watch, listen and read about his work here.  

(Photo credit: Eco-News)

Resilient Cities: Rethinking the Urban Landscape

From The New America Foundation:

The ability to bounce back, to absorb shocks, to persevere, to retain functionality over time, to endure, to adapt, to succeed, to survive, to sustain… so many verbs are conjured up by the term “resilience.” Whether we’re talking about our bodies, our minds, our communities, our institutions or our natural environment, the R-word provides a conceptual framework for designing a better tomorrow. Please join us for a wide-ranging inquiry on what it means to be resilient and what a resilient future could look like.

The discussion features:

Kaid Benfield – @Kaid_at_NRDC
Director of Sustainable Communities, Natural Resources Defense Council

Justin Hollander – @justinhollander
Professor, Tufts University
Author, Sunburnt Cities: The Great Recession, Depopulation, and Urban Planning in the American Sunbelt

Sander van der Leeuw – @ASUGreen
Dean, School of Sustainability, Arizona State University
Co-Chair, Complex Adaptive Systems Initiative, Arizona State University

Moderator
Andrés Martinez – @NewAmerica
Vice President and Editorial Director, New America Foundation

(Image credit: Common Current)

Thomas Edison on the great potential of solar energy. In 1931.

(Source: CleanTechnica)

From FastCoDesign:

Check out the article from which the infographic came here. You may also want to check out the ABC News article, ‘World running out of resources: UN’.

From Wired News:

The global production of oil has remained relatively flat since 2005 and peaked in 2008, declining ever since even as demand has continued to increase. The result has been wild fluctuations in the price of oil as small changes in demand set off large shocks in the system.

In Wednesday’s issue of Nature, James Murray of University of Washington and David King of Oxford University argue this sort of volatility is what we can expect going forward, and we’re likely to face it with other fossil fuels as well.

The notion of peak oil is fairly simple: Oil is a finite resource and at some point we simply won’t be able to extract as much as we once did. There is no getting around that limit for any finite resource. The issue that has made peak oil contentious, however, is the debate over when we might actually hit it. Murray and King are not the first to conclude that we’ve already passed the peak. Even as prices have climbed by about 15 percent per year since 2005, production has remained largely flat.

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“We are not running out of oil,” the authors argue, “but we are running out of oil that can be produced easily and cheaply.”

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What are the consequences of being stuck at or near peak oil? The authors have produced a graph showing that, while supply is elastic enough to meet demand, prices stay stable. Once demand consistently exceeds supply, prices swing wildly. Murray and King term this a “phase transition” and suggest we’ll be in the volatile phase from here on out.

That has some significant consequences. Of the 11 recessions the United States has experienced since World War II, 10 have been preceded by a sudden change in oil prices. The United States isn’t alone, either. Italy’s entire trade deficit, which has contributed to its financial troubles, can be accounted for by the rise in imported oil. The world, it seems, has allowed its economies to become entirely dependent upon fossil fuels.

“If oil production can’t grow, the implication is that the economy can’t grow either,” the authors write. “This is such a frightening prospect that many have simply avoided considering it.”

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The commentary concludes that we simply can’t rely on any fossil fuel to provide a stable and economic source of energy for more than a couple of decades. And, given the economic shocks that result from rapid changes in energy prices, that’s a serious problem.

“Economists and politicians continually debate policies that will lead to a return to economic growth,” the authors note. “But because they have failed to recognize that the high price of energy is a central problem, they haven’t identified the necessary solution: weaning society off fossil fuel.”

Check out the rest of the article here.

The New York Times, Scientific American, PhysOrg, and Energy Bulletin all have their own coverage of this important study.

I’ve also attached the chart below from the International Energy Agency’s 2010 World Energy Outlook report. It pegs peak oil as having been reached in 2006. The chart’s white text was added by resilience strategist Chris Martenson in his economic analysis of the report’s implications.  

(Photo source: Wired News)

‘What Peak Oil Is & What It Is Not’

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Matt Simmons, a.k.a. ‘The Republican Who Dared Tell the Truth About Oil’ was an energy investment banker, author and one-time advisor to George W. Bush. He passed away in 2010. This YouTube video features him discussing what peak oil is and is not.

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You can check out the slides from one of his last presentations, including the one below, over at Business Insider.

These strategies come from a chapter written by leading urban sustainability expert Warren Karlenzig for the Post Carbon Institute’s excellent ‘Post Carbon Reader’. You can check out his blog and work here.

(Photo credit: Seed Magazine via Urbanism.org)

Connections: Graphing Food Prices and Oil Prices, 2000-2010

This graph comes from energy expert Richard Heinberg’s recent article, ‘Soaring Oil and Food Prices Threaten Affordable Food Supply’. The piece explains that:

The current global food system is highly fuel- and transport-dependent. Fuels will almost certainly become less affordable in the near and medium term, making the current, highly fuel-dependent agricultural production system less secure and food less affordable.

To respond to this predicament Heinberg argues:

What is needed is a major redesigning of both food and energy systems. The goal of managers of the global food system should be to reduce its dependence on fossil energy inputs while also reducing GHG emissions from land-use activities. Achieving this goal will require increasing local food self-sufficiency and promoting less fuel- and petrochemical-intensive methods of production.

You can check out the rest of the article here. Also, if you’re looking for more on local, food oriented solutions you may want to check out ‘The Essential Gardening and Food Resilience Library’. 

(Graphic credit: Post Carbon Institute) 

Above is the conclusion of Nancy Southern’s article for Triple Pundit, ‘Why are people so immune to change?’ Southern is the chair of the organizational systems program at San Francisco’s Saybrook University and a regular contributor to ‘Rethinking Complexity’.   

(Photo credit: National Geographic)