Staples Redux: Oil and Honey

Oil is a staple. Honey isn’t. That’s the point.

The odd coupling comes from Bill McKibben’s most recent book, which is titled “Oil and Honey.”

Oil is crude. Honey is sweet. That says it all.

The central point that McKibben is making is that oil is global and honey is local, and that the disruptive climate change that is taking place, while worsened by oil, is tipping the scales against the global and toward the local.”

McKibben writes: “we need new local economies if for no other reason than that they will weather the coming storms a little bit better. In place of our two-big-to-fail systems of banking and energy and agriculture, we need squat, hardy, scaled-down versions.”