The British economy is unprepared for the consequences of peak oil, a group of British businesses warns today. While the recession has delayed it by around two years, an oil crunch should still be expected before 2015. That’s the message from the Industry Taskforce on Peak Oil and Energy Security (ITPOES) who released their second [...]
Archive | February, 2010
The five stages of decline
I came across this today, the five stages of decline, as expounded by business author Jim Collins in his book How the Mighty Fall. He’s writing about corporations, but I reckon you can read the whole of the modern consumerist/economic liberalism project into this graph. Thatcher and Reagan deliver stage one, the boom of the [...]
Metro: London’s new and better bank
New banks are quite common in many parts of the world, but there hasn’t been a new bank on a British high street for decades. That’s about to change, with London’s Metro bank due to open to customers this week. With many large banks closing branches to cut costs, a stubborn tradition of closing early, [...]
Climate scepticism – a turning tide or a post-Copenhagen anti-climax?
Last week I posted the results a poll from the States that showed how the number of people who are sceptical about climate science is on the rise. The BBC have carried out a similar survey in the UK, and found similar results: That’s a pretty stunning change in opinion since November, the result of [...]
What we learned this week
The general public may not be taking entirely seriously just yet, but the US military are – climate change is now formally part of military strategy, and recognised as a destabilising force. It’s been a week for not getting away with things, as some of our MPs have discovered, but the big sting is BAE [...]
A Blueprint for a Safer Planet, by Nicholas Stern
The Stern Review, as you may have gathered, is a highly influential document on the economics of climate change. It came out in 2006 and was a real game changer, showing that the cost of action to prevent climate change would be less harmful to the economy than the consequences of inaction. It’s a complicated [...]
Green Up Luton – a local update
A local update. International readers may want to skip this post, unless you’re interested in the practical stuff we get involved in. Green Up Luton Luton Borough Council is challenging ten households to ‘Green Up’ in as many ways as they can think of, including saving energy, reducing waste, and travelling by more sustainable means. [...]
Peak oil and science fiction
A couple of weeks ago I was making my regular pilgrimmage to London’s second hand bookshops*, and down in the basement of one of them I found a rather curious cultural artifact: a novel called Oil Seeker, by Michael Elder. It’s long forgotten and rightly so, but Oil Seeker is a work of science fiction [...]
Life squared
I thought I’d mention a website I came across recently, Life squared. It’s the brainchild of Richard Docwra, author of Modern Life – as good as it gets?. The site aims “to help people to ‘live well’ – to live happy, wise and fulfilled lives within the pressure and complexity of the modern world.” To that [...]
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