Oil, particularly in the West, has become almost as necessary to our way of life as oxygen and water. It is quite the thought experiment to figure out how much we are dependant on the stuff–and what will happen when it starts to run out.
Peak Oil proponents hold that we have used around 50% of extractable oil and thus face a dwindling, increasingly expensive supply. (One proviso: OPEC do not reveal their reserve estimates but, as every driver knows, prices have been rising over recent years, indicating demand outstripping supply).
Cut out oil overnight and our social and commercial fabric would quickly collapse: supermarkets would be empty in a matter of days for example. But this will be a slower crisis and, if we are to overcome it, we need to act now.
One grassroots initiative that has taken off in recent years, particuarly in English-speaking countries, is called Transition Towns. You can learn more in an article I wrote for the Smarter Cities website recently:
Imagination…is the healthy child’s most precious possession, the bedrock of their ultimate identity as autonomous and well-adjusted adults.
Why then, one might ask, does society lay siege on imagination? For that is how things stand today.
To begin with, falsely believing abductions and child murders to be everyday dangers, we have put in a host of needless restrictions on children’s lives, preventing them as a result from experiencing much nature (or life indeed) beyond the bite-sized chunks dolloped out to them on screen or in museums.
We allow advertisers (even on RTE, to our shame) to exploit children by making them feel self-conscious for not having Object X or looking like Celebrity Y.
You can read the full text of this article I wrote for the Mayo News, by clicking the link below:
Such is the electric opulence of Las Vegas, my erstwhile home, that one can forget how vast quantities of power and water are required to keep the city in its customary orgasmic brilliance.
Enter the Colorado River–which kisses the southern edge of the Silver State and keeps Las Vegas alive.
Of course, long ago, when the southwestern states divvied up river resources, little did they imagine that a city of 2 million high-maintenance souls would emerge in the pitiless Desert cauldron of the Las Vegas Valley.
But emerge that city did, replete with mod cons and then some. And then along came Global Warming in the shape of an ongoing drought.
Add to that trenchant opposition to water extraction from rural counties…and you end up with the present situation: a regional water system under severe stress, as evidenced by the dramatic “bath ring” in Lake Mead pictured above.
You can read an article I just wrote for the NRDC’s Smarter Cities website on this topic, as well as listen to a portion of an interview I conducted with Pat Mulroy, the Las Vegan charged with meeting the city’s water needs, by clicking the link below:
In the week that the world’s biggest bookseller announced they are selling more Ebooks than hardbacks, it seems apposite to hearken to the message below, written with us in mind by Ulster poet Louis MacNeice.
This dates from just over half a century ago and the time to consider the poem’s meaning has surely come.
Happily our generation comes out of this interrogation rather well, as the English language, whatever the platform, is livelier and more playful than ever. But I leave it to you to decide–after all, the piece is addressed…
To Posterity
When books have all seized up like the books in graveyards
And reading and even speaking have been replaced
By other, less difficult, media, we wonder if you
Will find in flowers and fruit the same colour and taste
They held for us for whom they were framed in words,
And will your grass be green, your sky be blue,
Or will your birds be always wingless birds?
Our kids have great books in their bedrooms, most of which they have read or we have read to them. Here’s how to accumulate books your kids will be grateful for:
1: Never buy a book by a celebrity
2: Never buy a book that is a numbered part of a series
3: Never buy a book that is tied-in to a movie or TV product
4: Let your kids buy (or borrow) whatever they want.
No celebrities, no series, no cameras: remember these rules of thumb and you will have yourself a powerful tool to help you when next you are standing in the bookstore, facing the 90% garbage that most booksellers offer our children. (Is any other group of consumers treated so badly?)
With these rules, you can quickly gather a pile of quality books to choose from: books that got onto that bookshelf largely on their own merits.
An objection could be made that most kids’ classics, The Jungle Book, say, or the Harry Potter novels, all had movies made of them. But, caveat emptor: the books under these names in stores today are often a shabby mixture of movie screenshots and insipid ‘retellings’. And look out for ‘abridged versions’: more grown-up stupidity dressed up as concern for children, the poor dears. The best place to find the original classics is in the library or by reference to the publisher: Puffin Books is one imprint I trust for editorial commonsense.
Rule #4 is vital of course: if they are doing the choosing, children should always be allowed to choose what they like, without any comment from parents.
Rules are made to be broken so, for instance, I would make an exception to #2 for the likes of Tintin and to #4 for material that is patently unsuitable and likely to disturb e.g. adult horror stories.
Video of the talk I gave the other night in Westport, at Ignite the West. Great fun, great people, and a really good forum to hatch new ideas. Thanks to the organizers, Steve and Dermot, for a great opportunity.
I just sent the following letter to my public representatives here in Ireland on the subject of the madness that is NAMA; if you’re in the same sinking ship I encourage you to do the same: you can find the addresses you need here. Those of you outside of Ireland should pause for a moment and consider the progress of a country determined to not only undo its achievements but also put paid to any future ambitions.
I am writing to you to express my deep concern as an Irish citizen about the establishment of NAMA and, in particular, the unorthodox methods being used to establish the value of properties concerned.
Perhaps all concerned are acting in good faith–but there is a great danger that the present and future treasure of our country, of our children and our grandchildren, will be squandered: all in a vain attempt to mitigate the losses of a reckless element.
The thinking of course is that those losses, when realized, represent a systemic risk. That may be so. But the creation of NAMA, like so many responses in this crisis, is ill-conceived and burdensome.
For one thing, why are stakeholders in our banks not absorbing the losses first?
For another, why are values being determined as though they will not fall further?
And, to stop only at three points where a dozen could be made: how immune is NAMA to the “stroke-pulling” that seems endemic to our public life?
I would appreciate you redoubling your efforts to stop NAMA; if you are in support of it, I beg you to reconsider.
Like so many of its ilk, Dublin Airport has been remodelled in such a way that all traces of its actual location have been effaced: it is now one among thousands of such mediocre nodes to be found in the network of international space, all alike devoid of any indications betraying where you might be on the planet. The same books and magazines and coffee are sold. The same mix of nationalities mill about. The same escalators and monitors and security equipment. The same temperature. The same air.
In Dublin however I came across one exception. At the departure gate there was a large lightbox hung on the wall, bearing the following quote from Lady Gregory, taken from one of her reworkings of Celtic legend:
“It is sweet to people to be telling a lie, but it is bitter in the end.”
In a flourishing economy, the public sector should be as small as possible. But not so small that it cannot prepare and deliver contingency plans.
Does the hapless response of the Bush Administration to the financial crisis–the inability to grasp the scale of the problem, the sheer lack of preparedness and of ready resources to deal with contingencies–remind you of something?
Hurricane Katrina, perhaps? Or post-invasion Iraq?
In each case the government’s response has been essentially the same: a failure to grasp the scale of the disaster together with a dearth of contingency plans.
In the case of Iraq, the CIA’s major concern was ensuring enough US flags were in hand for the welcoming crowds to welcome their “liberators”.
When it came to Katrina, FEMA chief Mike Browne was showered with congratulations from President Bush while an American city was drowning.
Now, with the US investment banking system not only in trouble but actually destroyed, a victim of Wall Street greed condoned by government laissez-faire, we find the authorities flummoxed at the markets’ unwillingness to act on their assurances.
Contingency planning is something we expect of governments. It is one of their primary functions: to plan for the worst. Governments, not private firms, invest in defenses against chemical or nuclear attack or take steps to avert the consequences of climate change.
Unfortunately, the Republican Party discovered, through Ronald Reagan’s success, that attacking, belittling, and demoralising government had the perverse effect of ensuring power: from 1980, the GOP have been adepts of this strategy.
Small government is good, particularly for free-market economies: this truth was at the kernel of the “Reagan Revolution”.
But the public sector should not be shrunk to the extent that it cannot come to the rescue when needed. Nor should public funding be misdirected or cut to the point that there is no Plan B when the best-of-all-possible-outcomes fails to materialize.
For proof you no longer have to ask the people of Baghdad or New Orleans.
Oil, particularly in the West, has become almost as necessary to our way of life as oxygen and water. It is quite the thought experiment to figure out how much we are dependant on the stuff–and what will happen when it starts to run out. 
Here’s an original story I told at an Open Mic in the 
In the week that the world’s biggest bookseller announced they are selling 
Our kids have great books in their bedrooms, most of which they have read or we have read to them. Here’s how to accumulate books your kids will be grateful for:
Like so many of its ilk, Dublin Airport has been remodelled in such a way that all traces of its actual location have been effaced: it is now one among thousands of such mediocre nodes to be found in the network of international space, all alike devoid of any indications betraying where you might be on the planet. The same books and magazines and coffee are sold. The same mix of nationalities mill about. The same escalators and monitors and security equipment. The same temperature. The same air. 