revolution
esiegel | November 1, 2013"Galileo got it wrong. The Earth does not revolve around the Sun. It revolves around you and has been doing so for decades. At least, this is the model you are using." -Srikumar Rao
It's the end of the week, so that means its time to take on another one of your questions from the question/suggestion box, and continue our ongoing Ask Ethan series! Even though there's a backlog of hundreds of questions, you should keep sending the new ones in, as all questions are fair game for any segment. This week's question comes from reader Brian Mucha, who asks us:
Where did the sun and planets get their…
sastyk | October 10, 2011Last year at the 2010 ASPO conference (and over the years at other places) I've highlighted the connection between oil prices and food prices - and the ways that our increasingly tightly tied oil and food systems unravel together. If you missed these graphs last week, they'll give you the beginnings of the picture, but I can show you a few thousand more. In every conceivable way, we have worked to tie energy and food prices together - from our increasing reliance on globalized markets and shipping to our fertilizer dependence, to our growth in biofuel usage, to centralized meat production…
sastyk | August 1, 2011The Riot for Austerity came about this way. In 2007, after the release of the IPCC report, and a number of books drawing attention to climate change, a friend of mine and I were discussing our frustration that no political organization was considering any kind of emissions cuts that even resembled those necessary to limit the damage from climate change. In fact whenever we discussed the 90+% emissions cuts required to give us the best chance of a reasonable stable climate, the immediate reaction was "that's not going to happen!"
Stealing a great line from George Monbiot's wonderful book…
sastyk | March 2, 2011If you want to see it in color, all you have to do is google image up a history of the price of oil and superimpose it on the price of various staple crops. Take a look at oil and then rice, soybeans, wheat and corn. Look closely at 2008, and at the present. I will put up a visual presentation of this material myself later this week, but if you'd like to see it sooner, it is right there to look at, no great challenge.
What we see is fairly simple - and incredibly complicated. The intertwining of markets, of energy and food, tied by biofuel production and national policies, and the fact…
stoat | February 11, 2011 Some good news for a change. Well done chaps! Now, how about that dictatorship we're propping up in Saudi Arabia?
I didn't actually do anything useful in all this (other than copy-editing the wikipedia article, I'm sure that boosted their revolutionary fervour) but I was rooting for them.
Brian was more useful.
On a lighter note: don't try this at home: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qEjiw1VcPGU
Refs
* Egypt's Mubarak resigns as leader (BBC)