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As the world slowly wakes up to the importance of off-grid living, our knowledge is becoming valuable, or should that be invaluable?

When a nation as advanced as Japan shuts down its nuclear reactors and starts going off the grid a house at a time, you know the rest of the world will follow, eventually.

So Off-Grid.Net is opening a Net-Zero consultancy service to offer individuals, architects and businesses access to the huge range of skills and resources within our community.…

WWF-UK says western society will soon have to look to innovation in Asia for leading green trends.

Asian innovations are already rippling across the globe with China bringing integrated electric vehicles, renewables energy and battery technologies to market, frugal innovation in India highlighting how firms can dramatically cut energy and natural resource use, while Bangladeshi micro-finance and micro renewables services illustrate how new bottom-of-the-pyramid approaches can work.…

The price of gold has tumbled to less than $1,200 (£787) an ounce yesterday, its lowest point in nearly three years, and continues to head towards $1000 as concerns over the US Federal Reserve’s plans to rein in financial stimulus continue to unnerve markets.

After dropping to $1,180 late on Thursday, the yellow metal made a small rebound on Friday morning to $1,202, but not enough to stem expectations that prices will continue to weaken. This web site forecast months ago that the gold price would collapse to below $1000. We faced fierce criticism at the time, but economists like Nouriel Roubini have since stated they also make the same forecast.

Long seen as a safe haven by preppers, the fall in gold does not mean that the risk of a systemic collapse is also thought to have receded. It is as much to do with declining liquidity in China.…

Two arrests recently have featured lone, crazy hermits stealing from trusting folk who leave stuff out and unguarded because that is usually OK in the countryside.Its important we stand up and disassociate ourselves from this sort of behavior. This web site recently featured a warning from a lady who had invited someone to share her off-grid land, and he has ended up wrecking it. We will be featuring this story in more depth once we have investigated the background more thoroughly
Many locals in his part of Maine said they were relieved by Christopher Knight’s arrest after enduring years of break-ins. Frank Ten Broeck, a retired New Jersey police official who has a cottage nearby, marvelled at Knight’s fortitude.…

The slow-walking mindless undead of many a horror film may figure in our nightmares, but increasingly we experience the zombie walk in our working lives as well. Maybe you are one of the millions working in businesses that have accrued so much debt since the recession began, that they have little prospect of ever being able to repay it.

The directors of these businesses, and their employees, continue working each day with no end to the misery in sight – thanks to government help, ultra-loose monetary policy and, often, the reluctance of lenders to write down bad loans since the crisis.

The belief is spreading that these firms – which spend their cash servicing interest payments are unable to invest in new equipment or future growth areas – are to blame for the weak recovery,…

The average working person struggles while Corporate profits soar. The middle class is being replaced by automation.

We underestimate the impact of automation. This video observes how, as the economic crisis deepens, competition gets tougher.

This is forcing business to automate more which in turn lays people off, reducing purchasing power and fuelling the crisis further. This self destructive trend has a limit where the system stops, and we may be close to that limit.…

It must be recognised that the so-called Green Movement has failed to establish a Green Economy. How could we create opportunity and value from waste? How could we sell organic food when it can never compete with the low prices of mass produced food?

Some people claim we consume only 2% of the coffee that is grown in the world, so why not use the waste to grow shitake, or produce biogas, or feed animals with the other 98%?

The Zero Emissions Research and Initiatives (ZERI) presents in this short film the concept behind The Blue Economy — sustainable business models that mimick biology to create technology and innovations.…