The end of growth is why we need to re-invent our banking and monetary systems. Both have collapsed and won’t survive. Each have been founded on a single untruth: infinite growth. The bank bailouts and money printing are simply delaying what everyone knows: our old systems are bankrupt.

But the Earth isn’t bankrupt and will continue to provide for us in a reasonable manner. We just need to create the new banking and monetary systems that reflect this reasonable, sustainable way of nature.

Heinberg’s first book on Peak oil, “The Party’s Over” written in 2005 was fantastic and “The End of Growth” looks like it could couple the Peak movement with the Occupy movement.

Source: Post Carbon Institute

Heinberg’s overarching message is that the current economic downturn is not temporary and that, because we have now reached fundamental, unalterable ecological limits, economic growth is gone for good…our entire economy is now fundamentally addicted to debt and to continued, indefinite growth. Oops.

Heinberg goes on to explain that because we’re reaching peak…well…peak everything, and because economic growth relies on natural resources and the Earth’s ability to process our wastes, this growth simply can’t continue. He says that our money has come to represent claims on goods and services that just don’t exist. Through debt and “fiat” currency, the amount of money in the world just gets bigger and bigger, while the Earth’s total stock of resources remains the same. Something has to give.

Unlike previous authors, going back to Thomas Malthus, then later Dennis and Donella Meadows, Herman Daly, and more recently, Tim Jackson and Gus Speth—to all of whom Heinberg gives their due—he’s not just saying that economic growth should stop or that it will stop. He’s saying that it in fact has stopped, whether we like it or not. Discussion in the popular media aside, this is not a choice. Physical laws dictate that all living things must stop growing at some point and, our adamant resistance notwithstanding, the human species has reached that point.

But haven’t we heard before how growth will stop because we’ve run out of resources? (Think The Population Bomb.) So far, it hasn’t happened. Innovation (say the business people), substitution (say the economists), and efficiency (say the scientists) have always allowed us to overcome any resource limitations and advance along the path of progress and growth—and they will continue to do so in the future. But Heinberg says, not this time. Today, innovation mostly just involves tweaking existing technologies. And some materials fundamental to economic growth—most notably fossil fuels—simply have no substitutes. And efficiency can be used to decouple energy use from economic growth only to a certain point.

The following article is highly recommended because it connects the Occupy Wall Street movement with the vital knowledge of sustainability.

As public resources of the world increasingly get privatised — crony land deals that give valuable public resources to private business — there eventually comes a time when there are fewer public resources to loot than resources that already been privatised. I call this  “Peak Privatisation”. At this peak, the number of displaced, redundant people outnumbers the capability of the Privateers to pacify them. I think we are seeing this today in the Occupy movement.

The controlling class does not know how to respond and the protesters don’t know what to demand or what to do with their time and energy as they “occupy” the privatised land. The long-term, non-violent solution to privatisation is sustainability, as this interview shows.

Whenever people are able to live sustainably from the land, they are independent and free.

Source: Truth Out

The people who created the crisis in the first place will not be the ones that come up with a solution.

That is why we must pay close attention to those with another imagination: an imagination outside of capitalism, as well as communism. We will soon have to admit that those people, like the millions of indigenous people fighting to prevent the takeover of their lands and the destruction of their environment – the people who still know the secrets of sustainable living – are not relics of the past, but the guides to our future.

Source: Post-Peak Living

After a tremendous amount of work, Harvey Ussery’s new book, The Small-Scale Poultry Flock, An All-Natural Approach to Raising Chickens and Other Fowl for Home and Market Growers, is now available! Here is what people are saying about it:

“Harvey Ussery delivers all the practical information you need to grow your own eggs and meat birds, in a style and format that will keep you interested and amused. Plus, he raises the larger question: what kind of world do we want to live in? One that treats animals as units of production, or one that honors all life, especially that farmstead marvel, the domesticated chicken?”
— Sally Fallon Morell, President, The Weston A. Price Foundation

“Here’s the ultimate book for those who want to know everything there is to know about raising poultry. And every detail is backed up by the author’s own (and often entertaining) experiences. I could not find ”in this encyclopedic array of chicken knowhow” one detail that I would quibble with.”
— Gene Logsdon, author of Holy Shit and The Contrary Farmer

“The Small-Scale Poultry Flock is about establishing a free-range poultry flock fully integrated into a healthy homestead ecosystem. Based upon the author’s decades of hands-on experience with many breeds and species, it covers all the basics about raising poultry, and fills some important gaps not usually covered well enough elsewhere, including chicken behavior, poultry breeding, raising chicks with broody hens, managing free-ranging, dealing with predators, using electric net fencing, feeding poultry with home-grown feeds, and integrating the poultry with soil mineral balance, gardens, lawns and pastures, orchards, worm bins, and soldier fly (larvae) production. If you want to raise chickens and can afford just one book, I recommend this one.”
— Carol Deppe, author of The Resilient Gardener

Available at Indigo bookstores in Canada.

If there were no suburban office “parks” then there would be less incentive to live in the suburbs and less incentive to drive EVERYWHERE. There would be more incentive to live in urban, energy efficient communities where daily interaction with people and a sense of community was common.

Source: NY Times

IN an era of concern about climate change, residential suburbs are the focus of a new round of critiques, as low-density developments use more energy, water and other resources. But so far there’s been little discussion of that other archetype of sprawl, the suburban office.

Rethinking sprawl might begin much more effectively with these business enclaves. They cover vast areas and are occupied by a few powerful entities, corporations, which at some point will begin spending their ample reserves to upgrade, expand or replace their facilities…

…suburban offices are even more unsustainably designed than residential suburbs. Sidewalks extend only between office buildings and parking lots, expanses of open space remain private and the spreading of offices over large zones precludes effective mass transit.

These workplaces embody a new form of segregation, where civic space connecting work to the shops, housing, recreation and transportation that cities used to provide is entirely absent. Corporations have cut themselves off from participation in a larger public realm.

Rethinking pastoral capitalism is integral to creating a connected, compact metropolitan landscape that tackles rather than sidesteps a post-peak-oil future. This requires three interrelated strategies. State and federal governments should stop paying for new highway extensions that essentially subsidize the conversion of agricultural land for development, including corporate offices. Existing infrastructure needs maintenance and renewal, not expansion.

Since 1989, when Pons and Fleishman were discredited from their work with cold fusion, this technology has gone largely underground. But it may have a second life – if the U.S. DARPA doesn’t quash it first.

Source: Wired U.K.

Against all the odds, Andrea Rossi’s E-Cat cold fusion power plant passed its biggest test yesterday, producing an average of 470 kilowatts for more than five hours. (A technical glitch prevented it from achieving a megawatt as originally planned). The demonstration was monitored closely by engineers from Rossi’s mysterious US customer, which was evidently satisfied and paid up.

The energy was output in the form of heat, measured by the quantity of water boiled off. The results are reported in NyTeknik and Pure Energy Systems News, who both had reporters present for the test. Associated Press also sent a correspondent who should be filing a story in the next few days (one suspects his editors might have some questions)…

The successful test should pave the way for further work at the University of Bologna, and more contracts with the enigmatic customer. NyTeknik did discover one possible clue to their identity. The customer’s controller, one Domenico Fioravanti, apparently reports to a man whose title is “Colonel”. This suggests that the mystery customer might be DARPA, the Pentagon’s extreme science wing which, as Wired.co.uk has previously noted, has expressed interestin Rossi’s work — but which might not be quite ready to explain to its political masters why it spent millions on a cold fusion device.

THRIVE is an unconventional documentary that lifts the veil on what’s REALLY going
on in our world by following the money upstream — uncovering the global
consolidation of power in nearly every aspect of our lives. Weaving together
breakthroughs in science, consciousness and activism, THRIVE offers real solutions,
empowering us with unprecedented and bold strategies for reclaiming our lives and
our future.

On November 11, 2011 THRIVE will be released worldwide on the Internet.

Source: Planetary Activation Organization

This is an amazing idea that takes a liability (the cost of asphalt roads) and turns it into an asset (electricity generating solar panels). Can it be made to work? Probably… if only the oil industry didn’t stand to lose billions.

Potential benefits/applications:

• Safety warnings displayed on the road
• Illuminated dividing lines
• De-iced roads
• Real-time traffic sensors
• Pipes for electrical and data cables
• Really, really fun playgrounds!

Source: Solar Roadways

Years ago, when the phrase “Global Warming” began gaining popularity, we started batting around the idea of replacing asphalt and concrete surfaces with solar panels that could be driven upon. We thought of the “black box” on airplanes: We didn’t know what material that black box was made of, but it seemed to be able to protect sensitive electronics from the worst of airline crashes.

Suppose we made a section of road out of this material and housed solar cells to collect energy, which could pay for the cost of the panel, thereby creating a road that would pay for itself over time. What if we added LEDs to “paint” the road lines from beneath, lighting up the road for safer night time driving?

What if we added a heating element in the surface (like the defrosting wire in the rear window of our cars) to prevent snow/ice accumulation in northern climates? The ideas and possibilities just continued to roll in and the Solar Roadway project was born.

Source: ChrisMartenson.com

A growing number of individuals believe our economic and societal status quo is defined by unsustainable addiction to cheap oil and ever increasing debt. With that viewpoint, it’s hard not to see a hard takedown of our national standard of living in the future. Even harder to answer is: what do you do about it?

Charles Hugh Smith, proprietor of the esteemed weblog OfTwoMinds.com, sees the path to future prosperity in removing capital from the Wall Street machine and investing it into local enterprise within the community in which you live. 

“Enterprise is completely possible in an era of declining resource consumption. In other words, just because we have to use less, doesn’t mean that there is no opportunity for investing in enterprise. I think enterprise and investing in fact, are the solution. And if we withdraw our money from Wall Street and put it to use in our own communities, to the benefit of our own income streams, then I think that things happen.”

Wow. This could be a game changer, if true.

The debate has always been: can shale gas be safely extracted from the Earth without poisoning drinking water? For more on that debate, see: Gasland the Movie.

The debate was never if this was a profitable business, until now…

Source: Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

“Money is pouring in” from investors even though shale gas is “inherently unprofitable,” an analyst from PNC Wealth Management, an investment company, wrote to a contractor in a February e-mail. “Reminds you of dot-coms.”

“The word in the world of independents is that the shale plays are just giant Ponzi schemes and the economics just do not work,” an analyst from IHS Drilling Data, an energy research company, wrote in an e-mail on Aug. 28, 2009.

Company data for more than 10,000 wells in three major shale gas formations raise further questions about the industry’s prospects. There is undoubtedly a vast amount of gas in the formations. The question remains how affordably it can be extracted.