[p2p-research] EU peak materials report

[Michel Bauwens]

also from doors of perception:

RESOURCE DEPLETION: NOT ENOUGH RAW MATERIALS FOR GREEN TECH?
Many people assume that 'green tech' will save our high entropy lifestyles
as
oil and gas become less abundant.. But rare earth metals essential to the
production of green tech - mobile phones, thin layer photovoltaics,
lithium-ion
batteries, synthetic fuels, among others -  are running short. The EU Raw
Materials Initiative says that we are approaching Peak Antimony, Peak
Cobalt,
Peak Gallium, Peak Germanium, Peak Indium, Peak Platinum, peak Palladium,
Peak
Neodymium and Peak Tantalum. Blimey.
http://europa.eu/rapid/pressReleasesAction.do?reference=IP/10/752&format=HTML&aged=0&language=EN&guiLanguage=en
FINANCIAL CRISIS 'DOUBLE DIP'
'Double dip' sounds more like an ice cream you'd buy at the beach than a
financial meltdown. A more somber tone was set at last month's Transition
Towns
conference by Stoneleigh, the co-editor of Automatic Earth. In a clinical
presentation, she described the convergence of Peak Oil, and the 'collapse
of
global Ponzi finance', as 'a perfect storm of converging phenomena that
threaten
to sink our age of prosperity through wealth destruction, social discontent,
and
global conflict'. The energy crisis and the financial crisis are feeding off
each other, said Stoneleigh.  Describing the hydrocarbon epoch (the one
we're in
now) as a 'fleeting interlude in history', she went on to anticipate a 'net
energy cliff' and an accompanying deflation. Phew.
http://sheffield.indymedia.org.uk/2010/06/453356.html
FOOD: HOW BANKSTERS STARVE THE POOREST PEOPLE
The most sickening of this month's reports is about food and finance. Jayati
Ghosh, a professor at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, has found
that
the dramatic rise and fall of world food prices in 2007-08 was largely a
result
of speculative activity in global commodity markets. At the height of the
financial boom, he reports, so-called 'index investors' were thought to own
35
per cent of corn futures contracts, 42 per cent of soybean contracts and 64
per
cent of wheat contracts. 'Cultivators and food consumers appear to have lost
in
this phase of extreme price instability', he writes; the only gainers from
this
process were 'financial intermediaries who were able to profit from rapidly
changing prices'. Despite the recent fall in agricultural prices in world
trade,
food prices remain high and even continue to increase for vulnerable groups.
Yuk.
http://www.networkideas.org/working/dec2009/08_2009.pdf
SLOWED FOOD REVOLUTION
The food situation is not much better in the rich-at-the-moment countries.
Heather Rogers writes in American Prospect that 'the local food revolution
doesn't stand a chance' because President Obama's Department of Agriculture
is
doing little to ensure the survival of holistic local farmers. Rogers
continues
that 'the government continues to channel public resources
disproportionately to
conventional growers -- benefits that then flow to the corporations from
which
they buy their seeds and chemicals and on to agribusiness processors in the
form
of cheap grain'. This text, too, is grim - but Michael Pollan says it's a
must-read. Gulp.
http://prospect.org/cs/articles?article=slowed_food_revolution

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