Taking a short break - No post this week

I'm taking a short break from posting this week. I expect to post again on Sunday, October 14.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Australia's drought, climate change and the future of food

There's a reason that few people are thinking about world grain supplies. Last year saw record worldwide production of grains and record stocks of grains left over. But this year worldwide production slipped about 2 percent, owing in large part to the plunge in Australia's production caused by an ongoing severe drought. Production is expected to fall 23 percent. Fortunately, in our globalized grain markets, this hasn't affected overall supplies or prices very much as grain stocks are high and supplies are mobile and shipped all over the world as needed. But Australia is the world's fifth largest wheat exporter, accounting for nearly 9 percent of the total in 2016 according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations . In fact, the top five wheat exporting countries account for 56 percent of world wheat exports. The rest of the world is highly dependent on these exporters to make up the difference between what they grow and what they eat. ...
Read more

Toward a new rhetoric of political ecology: Can religion teach us something?

Aristotle tells us that humans are political animals. For Aristotle this characteristic seems to distinguish humans from other animals enough to provide a unique area of study that applies only to humans--hence Aristotle's The Politics, a work which informs our political thinking to this day. Political ecology, on the other hand, posits that while humans are political, the political process, of necessity, includes the natural world as a political actor . The human and the nonhuman are not distinct categories, but rather part of a seamless order that is (currently) best described by political ecology. If the rhetoric of political ecology is to remain merely descriptive, we can stop here. But if we want that rhetoric to become a tool of change, we must go beyond the notion that “facts speak for themselves.” (We will get to the question of religion further on.) The late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan once said, "Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts....
Read more

Saudi Arabia and the war on shale oil that never ended

Last week when Saudi Arabia let it leak that the kingdom has no intention of leading OPEC toward another cut in production to accommodate the growing volumes of oil from American shale deposits, it was another sign that the Saudi war on shale actually never ended. To properly understand this announcement, we need to return to last fall. Most people believed then that the cuts agreed to by OPEC under Saudi leadership marked the end of Saudi Arabia's war on shale oil in America. At the time I cautioned against such a conclusion , and said I was doubtful that there would actually be any decline in world oil production because the Saudis didn't really want a decline. And, guess what? The OPEC cuts have yet to be fully implemented and have been offset by rising production elsewhere . And, the Saudis are now complaining that the Russians who, though not part of OPEC, agreed to cuts to support prices, are not keeping their end of the bargain . The Saudis are practicing a marvelous b...
Read more