This great little collection of videos is the clearest and most authoritative introduction to exactly how the monetary and banking system in the UK actually works. It is based on the excellent book ‘Where Does Money Come From?’ published by the Positive Money campaign and the new economics foundation
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[…] 2003 we started a wiki to ‘discuss monetary reform and democracy‘, and I just posted Positive Money’s Banking 101 video course, probably the best introduction to how money and banking actually […]
Historically, I was a big believer in peak oil which aptnreaply was supposed to happen in 2001.I remain a skeptic of this stuff. I think that there are vast, untapped liquid fuel resources in russia, greenland and even some remote areas like the southern atlantic. I’m also strangely optimistic about the US’s energy consumption. I think we’re right around the corner from technology that allows for dramatic cuts in consumption. In less than 2 years, solar PV will hit cost parity with coal, and there’s no reason the cost curve won’t continue below that. Electric vehicles will also begin to have mainstream appeal and not for ecological piety, but simply the fact that they’re cheaper to operate and have better performance. I think we’re actually closer to another tipping point when ecologically friendly technology enters the mainstream buoyed by the traditional market behaviors that reward efficiency. We’ve already seen this in the semiconductor manufacturing. Up until 6 years ago, the whole industry output had been focussed on speed, since then the industry has been focussed on power consumption. This change happened from purely organic market forces both data farms, cloud storage and mobile devices demanded lower power consumption. We will see the same phenomena happen in other parts of the economy as there are tremendously inefficient activities that will be ripe for improvement. I’m willing to look foolish on this. My only defense are cheap aphorisms like If I went 20 years back in time and told people that in 2013, ring tones would be a 13 billion industry, everyone would call me crazy. My point is, big changes in consumer behavior and culture can happen, much of it happening quietly without acknowledgement.
one of the problems is that whilst efficient is going up, total consumption is still going up faster.