Are current corporate-dominated international institutions inadequate to the task of meeting the multiple planetary survival challenges they themselves have helped create? As headlines proclaim that COP15 was a ‘catastrophe,’ that a global climate deal is ‘all but impossible in 2010,’ and progressive NGOs,’ “The forces trying to tackle climate change are in disarray, wandering in small groups around the battlefield like a beaten army,” according to one diplomat, Richard Heinberg of the Post Carbon Institute (postcarbon.org), talks about the factors contributing to the stalemate in the Copenhagen climate summit, the other ‘game ending’ challenges confronting the current economic system, and the bottom-up steps necessary to move to a post-carbon economy. Interviewed by EON’s James Heddle.
Beyond Copenhagen – Now what?
By Richard Heinberg, originally published by EON – Ecological Options Network
February 8, 2010
Richard Heinberg
Richard is Senior Fellow of Post Carbon Institute, and is regarded as one of the world’s foremost advocates for a shift away from our current reliance on fossil fuels. He is the author of fourteen books, including some of the seminal works on society’s current energy and environmental sustainability crisis. He has authored hundreds of essays and articles that have appeared in such journals as Nature and The Wall Street Journal; delivered hundreds of lectures on energy and climate issues to audiences on six continents; and has been quoted and interviewed countless times for print, television, and radio. His monthly MuseLetter has been in publication since 1992. Full bio at postcarbon.org.
Tags: Building Community, Coal, Culture & Behavior, Electricity, Energy Policy, Fossil Fuels, Media & Communications, Natural Gas, Oil, Renewable Energy, Resource Depletion
Related Articles
Is a new Copernican Revolution already underway?
By Jeremy Lent, Ecocivilization
A growing movement for the rights of nature and recognition of animal consciousness is challenging the ideology of human supremacy, treating the Earth as a community of beings rather than human property. It is a paradigm shift that may be the most urgent revolution of our time.
May 28, 2026
Can forests lose their memory? The warning coming from the Black Hills
By Rob Lewis, The Climate According to Life
In the Black Hills, Lakota teachings understand all beings as relatives bound together through relationship and reciprocity. As industrial forestry, extraction, and ecological disruption intensify, this article asks whether modern logging and restoration are eroding forests’ living memory and complexity.
May 28, 2026
Seeds Series Volume 2: How to live through collapse – unmaking a broken system
By Bill Baue, Bill Baue Substack
As civilizational systems buckle under ecological and social strain, this chapter of Seeds Volume 2 argues we must stop chasing solutions and instead dismantle the toxic logics of hierarchy and supremacism to rebuild regenerative, collapse-resilient cultures.
May 27, 2026





