Rhode Island Feeds

Article from The Guardian reveals growing concern by UK government officials.

A long overdue upgrade of this site is in the works. You’ve no doubt noticed that postings have slowed to a crawl for some time now. We have had serious functional issues, but we are determined to address these. Our aim is to make this site interactive, with sharing capability, and to make it more secure from bots besieging our server with God knows what. We operate the site on basically no budget (note the absence of “Donate” requests and advertising), so things move slower around here. The site itself will not go down, but I will not be posting much new content until after the upgrade. Keep checking back over the next few weeks, and thanks for bearing with us.

Important footage showing the scope of this disaster. What an unbelievable nightmare. This will affect all of us for decades. Thanks to Steve Roest and Sea Shepherd.

Charles Frink from New London, CT, with a great essay highlighting the Transition movement. Thanks, Alycia, for passing this along.

Richard Heinberg offers this recent essay on how the President is missing important opportunities to educate the American people about our energy predicament.

From Rachel Maddow:

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We’re all wondering what is going on with this horrific situation. Become as informed and as educated as possible. For the straight talk from geophysicists, engineers, and oil industry analysts (among others), read The Oil Drum.

John Leland’s article on the front page of Sunday’s New York Times is not bad. The article could have avoided referring to Daniel Yergin, who, despite his stature as one of the world’s foremost energy analysts, has downplayed concerns about oil depletion for decades now, choosing to serve as a cheerleader for Big Energy. The article discusses Andre Angelantoni’s Post Peak Living, along with Transition Towns and U.S. Reps. Roscoe Bartlett and Tom Udall’s Peak Oil Caucus. Worth reading.

Health and energy analyst Dan Bednarz, in this article, looks at the implicit messages of the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe. I pray that I’m wrong, but I think Bednarz may be overly optimistic on whether this is the event that turns us onto the path to genuine sustainability. Is our culture as a whole ready to recognize its complicity in these events? I think not. We adapted to polluted air, mountaintop removal mining, and two disastrous wars (to name a few examples) with no culture-wide epiphanies. Why should the destruction of the ocean environments, the coastlines, fisheries and wetlands of the Gulf of Mexico be any different? I know, because it’s the most horrific environmental disaster of our history. Maybe I unfairly anticipate the average American’s capacity for turning away from what he/she finds uncomfortable. Hell, I think all of us want to turn away from this ongoing nightmare. Again, I pray that I’m wrong. If every single person in this country reacted to this horror with revulsion and action, then maybe lasting permanent changes couldbe implemented. So let the national sustainability movement begin. No, I mean really begin. If we don’t express our outrage at this, we likely never will.