Great email Mark! I totally agree that if we really did care about reducing 
carbon emissions and healing the planet we would be concentrating on 
renewables at home and an economic policy geared towards less of everything. 
I had a good chat with an Any Answers researcher on Sat about this when I 
heard people referring to the triple-dip recession. Triple-dip? When will 
the multiples stop? It's dips all the way down! All wealth stems from 
natural resources and we are reaching, for want of a better phrase, the 
limits to growth. Sadly, I didn't get on air.

As for anything geared towards equitable distribution, localism, 
sustainable self-sufficient purposefulness....and social and economic 
justice, well we can dream! The scrabble for unconventionals has shown me, 
beyond doubt, that we will not choose a sustainable or equitable future. We 
will continue trying to green up business as usual so the corporations can 
skim off the profits, until the whole system fails to operate. Then we will 
change, but not by rational choice. Change forced by fear and disorder is 
never good! My answer to this realisation has been to get involved with my 
local community. We'll see where that goes. But the reason we are not 
changing our ways is not because we don't 'know' there's a problem - it's 
because we choose to ignore it and hope it goes away.

And to Richard, who just posted, it's great to hear from you! I've met a few 
people on this forum who seem to think that because they don't have academic 
status, their point of view isn't valid. Not true! I joined this forum not 
long after it formed, as it turns out, in 2004. Over the years, I've raised 
the issue of peak oil, which received a mixed response. Yet, here we are: 
conventional oil output peaked around 2005/6 and we're racing to get the 
last dregs of low-energy returning, highly polluting unconventionals (e.g. 
tar sands, shale gas and oil, coalbed methane). Of course there are still 
conventional reserves (e.g. the Arctic, Africa and so on) but in small 
amounts compared to what we have come to rely on. And the more energy that 
goes in to extracting them, the less there is left to 'do work' with.

We do need to speak out against the current economic system and be honest 
about our dire situation - as Mark says, holistically. Of course I hope my 
gloomy predictions for the future are wrong but nothing I'm seeing backs 
that up.

Did anyone see Prof Brian Cox's latest on Sunday eve? So good to hear energy 
being talked about like that on mainstream TV. But maybe that's just me!

Mandy
____________________

http://mandymeikle.wordpress.com/
@powerdowngirl

-----Original Message----- 
From: Mark Levene
Sent: Tuesday, January 29, 2013 9:38 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: test( some passing thoughts)

good Forumers

before things become too protracted (my time apparently never quite being my
own) I just wanted to add my own tuppence ha-pence worth to the start of
this year's discussions on the CF list.

It's always good to have some of our regulars pitching in with very
important info and equally informed commentary on the latest climate change
forecasts, and what in terms of mitigating it (still the rumblings of last
year's geo-engineering 'discussion') can be technically done about it.

That said, when David Cromwell and myself started CF a mere decade ago (not
I suspect grounds for congratulations ) the aim as in the full title of CF :
'The Forum for the Study of Crisis in  the 21st century' was always intended
as something a bit wider. Climate change is necessarily at the heart of our
concern, but the aim was to relate it, cross-reference it - to a whole
series of human social, political and cultural interactions which 'together'
might be consider indicative of where we are at..... and with the hope that
this would inspire folk on the list (academics or otherwise!) to suggest
ways and means by which quite ordinary, everyday folk might be enabled to
change their own, their families, their communities' lives' for 'the good'.
And, or to better  understand the complex world around them. The inference
was always on 'people' not public policy.

So, if I'd had time last week, where I would have begun would not have been
with the latest climate assessments per se but what was happening in north
Africa: the bloody news from Mali, the also bloody news from In Amenas. Not
to follow the media frenzy, but on the contrary because from what I could
see of that standard commentary, it was a classic case not only of looking
through the wrong end of the telescope but consciously avoiding or
deflecting what should be staring us in the face.

How much does what is happening in 'these far away' countries matter to
ourselves and our own analysis?  I would have thought enormously. To be
sure, personally, I don't know a stack about Mali, though I'm very aware
that the Tuaregs of the north (and of course across the Sahara and north
western Sahel more generally)  and their traditional nomadic culture  have
been under enormous political and environmental pressure for many decades,
which may explain the desperate and disastrous involvement of some of them
in the latest, now fractured al-Qaeda-linked rebellion. What, of course, I
'am' aware of is that the whole Sahelian zone is under increasing pressure
as drought becomes more intense, the lakes (Chad most obviously) and rivers
dry up, the forests are cut down, the historic sedentary versus nomad or
simply inter-group struggles for land and water become more intense. That
millions of people have been displaced from these zones, is the sort thing
you won't read much much about in the papers nor except occasionally of the
often complicated political knock-on effects, for instance, the involvement
of many Tuaregs and other Africans in Gaddafi's military apparatus....one of
'many' consequences.  But while not getting a paper (so forgive me if I've
missed some searing commentary) I could find scant little of these
underlying factors on the BBC news or anything else I've come across. I did
pick up a abandoned Guardian on the train, however,  the other day with a
pull out centre page spread of some desperately pressured guys (they looked
to me of different African ethnic origins) working under a blazing sun. The
caption without any further comment read , ' Sweet spot: Workers on a sugar
cane plantation in central southern Mali. The crop is cultivated in a joint
venture between the Chinese company and the Malian state, producing sugar
and ethanol'.

Is it not this sort of thing which should be inviting 'our' commentary? I
don't know about this particular Malian 'project'. But I do know that
similar projects (more obviously land-grabs) are happening all over the
Sahelian region, the Sudan in particular, and that food and bio-fuel
'security' for much better of people far away, rather than for the indigenes
themselves, is the name of the game.

By the same token, when David Cameron gets up in the House of Commons
speaking of the attack on In Amenas,  and the danger to  'our people' and
'our interests' is this not germane to our wider discussion about not only
climate change and fossil fuels  but the nature of the international
political-economic order? Why did  not anybody on the news dare say this is
why the Cameron speech and all the other pontifications which have followed,
gets  us to the heart of why and how we have got it all so wrong...i.e  ,
that if ''''we'''' in the 'West' cared a genuine fig about carbon emissions
and healing the planet, let alone saving human lives, 'we' (the corporates,
the governments, the city, the car driver on the petrol forecourt???)  would
be winding up the whole huge north African operation and concentrating
instead on renewables at home and an economic policy geared towards not more
of the same, but less of everything - geared towards equitable distribution,
localism,  sustainable self-sufficient purposefulness....and social and
economic justice. How in CF can we go on and on about the big technical,
climate science issues, if we can't integrate into that debate these wider
political and economic and energy and justice dimensions?  At a
international and local level?  And see that what is going on at these
levels is as much part of what we should be discussing as the actually very
often abstractised discussions we often have been having.

Of course, the list is the list and it works on the basis of who puts in the
time, energy and effort into commentary. All I'm lamely saying is that I
would encourage a broadening out of that conversation. I'm not the first to
say so, and may be I won't be the last. But I feel that we have 10 years on
become a bit stultified. In short, I'd encourage people on the list who
rarely offer their tuppence ha'pence worth to do so!

2013, alas, is likely to be a further awful year for the planet and all
living things who inhabit it.  But let's at least aim that it should be a
year where CF moves towards a more holistic, comprehensive as well as more
incisive commentary on the nature of the crisis .....

cheers,
mark