The World After Abundance

I think he relies on history a little too much in this article. As if modern technology means absolutely nothing and things still happen on the same time scale. However, I agree with a lot of things said here and seems to validate my idea for a wall surrounding vermont (or would that just be a huge waste of energy?). I don’t know what what’s his name draws issue with with the house linked at the bottom of the quote. No one knows what is really sustainable. I think that looks like an honest attempt at a sustainable house. That is if everyone can live in the woods, but with over-population the way it is, it looks like we’re going to have to figure out how to live together, densely.

Solutions? Bicycles, urban gardening, food preservation, community building, reduce your reliance on oil as much as possible, fortify your home and get renewable energy set up. I don’t think renewable energy built into homes is a “yuppie” concept. Solar hot water can be built for tens of dollars.

syntheticpubes:

I may have finally found an article that provides an intuitive understanding of EROEI.

For most of today’s environmentalists, renewable energy isn’t something that people produce for themselves – unless they happen to be wealthy enough to afford the rooftop photovoltaic systems that have become the latest status symbol in suburban neighborhoods on either coast. Instead, renewable energy is something that utilities and the government are supposed to produce as fast as possible, so that Americans can keep on using three times as much energy per capita as the average European and twenty times as much as the average Chinese.

…

Even among those who warn that today’s Great Recession could bottom out at a level equal to that reached in the Great Depression, very few have grappled with the consequences of a near-term future in which millions of Americans are living in shantytowns and struggling to find enough to eat every single day. To paraphrase Sinclair Lewis, that did happen here, and it happened at a time when the United States was a net exporter of everything you can think of, and the world’s largest producer and exporter of petroleum to boot. The same scale of economic collapse in a nation that exports very little besides unpayable IOUs and is the world’s largest consumer and importer of petroleum could all too easily have results much closer to those of the early 20th century in Central Europe…

Any chance these handsome hovels come with built-in wifi? :(

(this post was reblogged from syntheticpubes)
“
After much debate in the State House but without the signature of the governor, S.117 became law
on April 7, 2010, resulting in the following changes:
• The primary election will be held on the fourth Tuesday in August. This year the date is August
24.
• The primary election date for a special election will be held on the Tuesday that falls not less
than 60 days but not more than 66 days prior to the date set for the special election.
• Primary petitions and statements of nomination from minor party and independent candidates
shall be filed no sooner than the second Monday in May and not later than 5:00 p.m. on the
second Thursday after the first Monday in June preceding the primary election.

here’s where I went wrong. Turns out I’m not crazy, just not very attentive. I started my campaign in january. I printed out the petition to be on the ballot forms. The form says I  have till september. They changed the deadline in april. GREAT.

VIA http://www.vlct.org/d/advocacy/wlr_2010/wrapper/elections.pdf

Looking over the consent forms I printed, I see where I got the idea I had all summer: because that’s what it says. I don’t know when they changed the deadline but this form is updated for 2010, and very clearly says the deadline is September 17… Click for high-res photo

Looking over the consent forms I printed, I see where I got the idea I had all summer: because that’s what it says. I don’t know when they changed the deadline but this form is updated for 2010, and very clearly says the deadline is September 17…

oops

At the risk of looking like a total idiot, I’m going to be totally honest. I miss-read the page which explains the deadline to get candidate forms in. For some reason I thought I had all summer.

I decided to be honest about this because I feel like normal politicians who make dumb mistakes would try and cover up their tracks. Pretend it didn’t happen. Start lying. And I don’t think that’s the right thing to do. I fucked up, it’s my fault, and that’s the truth.

So now I’m going to assess the candidates that did get their shit in and likely endorse one of them. I don’t really want to run a write-in campaign, a big part of this was to get my name on the ballot. A write in campaign seems desperate, and I’m not going to scramble to win an election I was never going to win in the first place.

It’s also kind of a relief. I have so many other projects to pursue including being Burlington’s Fence Viewer. I’m going to try and focus more effort locally, like the north end ramble.

Currently I plan on continually updating this blog, I still have a few draft posts un-posted, so stay tuned. 2012 babay!!

create a national bike route - by IdeaScale

Though I am running for governor, I do like to post a lot of things that are related to the US as a whole and a lot of burlington related stuff. This is a link to my proposal for a national bike route on the Open DOT site. Vote for it pls thx.

Intervale Food Share Goes Car-less - Project Economy News Story - WPTZ Plattsburgh

This is how all food ought to be delivered.

xn—7xa: Where to go? With the public reluctant to put money in anything that felt like a paper investment, the Street quietly moved the casino to the physical-commodities market — stuff you could touch: corn, coffee, cocoa, wheat and, above all, energy commodities, especially oil. In conjunction with a decline in the dollar, the credit crunch and the housing crash caused a “flight to commodities.” Oil futures in particular skyrocketed, as the price of a single barrel went from around $60 in the middle of 2007 to a high of $147 in the summer of 2008. That summer, as the presidential campaign heated up, the accepted explanation for why gasoline had hit $4.11 a gallon was that there was a problem with the world oil supply. In a classic example of how Republicans and Democrats respond to crises by engaging in fierce exchanges of moronic irrelevancies, John McCain insisted that ending the moratorium on offshore drilling would be “very helpful in the short term,” while Barack Obama in typical liberal-arts yuppie style argued that federal investment in hybrid cars was the way out. But it was all a lie. While the global supply of oil will eventually dry up, the short-term flow has actually been increasing. In the six months before prices spiked, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, the world oil supply rose from 85.24 million barrels a day to 85.72 million. Over the same period, world oil demand dropped from 86.82 million barrels a day to 86.07 million. Not only was the short-term supply of oil rising, the demand for it was falling — which, in classic economic terms, should have brought prices at the pump down. (via one of the most important Rolling Stone articles you’ll ever read)

xn—7xa:

Where to go? With the public reluctant to put money in anything that felt like a paper investment, the Street quietly moved the casino to the physical-commodities market — stuff you could touch: corn, coffee, cocoa, wheat and, above all, energy commodities, especially oil. In conjunction with a decline in the dollar, the credit crunch and the housing crash caused a “flight to commodities.” Oil futures in particular skyrocketed, as the price of a single barrel went from around $60 in the middle of 2007 to a high of $147 in the summer of 2008.

That summer, as the presidential campaign heated up, the accepted explanation for why gasoline had hit $4.11 a gallon was that there was a problem with the world oil supply. In a classic example of how Republicans and Democrats respond to crises by engaging in fierce exchanges of moronic irrelevancies, John McCain insisted that ending the moratorium on offshore drilling would be “very helpful in the short term,” while Barack Obama in typical liberal-arts yuppie style argued that federal investment in hybrid cars was the way out.

But it was all a lie. While the global supply of oil will eventually dry up, the short-term flow has actually been increasing. In the six months before prices spiked, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, the world oil supply rose from 85.24 million barrels a day to 85.72 million. Over the same period, world oil demand dropped from 86.82 million barrels a day to 86.07 million. Not only was the short-term supply of oil rising, the demand for it was falling — which, in classic economic terms, should have brought prices at the pump down.

(via one of the most important Rolling Stone articles you’ll ever read)

(this post was reblogged from xn--7xa)

over population

To combat the overwhelming and controversial issue of over-population, contraception, abortions, and hysterectomy ought to be provided for everyone for free.

Paul Stamets on 6 ways mushrooms can save the world | Video on TED.com

why we need to do more research on mushrooms. I’m very much in favor of this.

Complexity

An important article I read recently (via alex Morgan). Is the world too complex for anyone to fix? Food for thought.