Energy

The messages and body of work that Richard leaves behind encourage us all to keep striving, creating, and living well within our planet’s limits.

Marcos Rupérez Cerqueda spent years as an engineer on green hydrogen projects in Spain, installing electrolysers and fuel cells, before the numbers made him stop believing in a technical fix. In this Q&A, he discusses this journey and his new book.

The facility calls for 456 small nuclear reactors, nuclear fuel production and nuclear waste storage. On the same day it surfaced, Sen. Ron Wyden introduced legislation that would ban new data centers.

The world teeters on the brink of economic disaster due to energy shortages caused by war. Key oil-producing nations are unable and unwilling to increase output, though prices are high. The solutions being proposed—renewable energy technologies—are coming on line, but not fast enough. Sound familiar?

It is true that no high-energy society has ever halved its material throughput and existed at that level across generations. But an absent precedent for an unprecedented situation merely tells us the situation is new, not what people will do.

With age, I’ve become more aware of the world’s complexity but also better equipped to come to simple, albeit painful, conclusions: We need to replace fantasies of endless growth with ideas about managing the contraction.