Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
At 9:30 am on March 12, 1963, in Room 1-B of Manhattan’s Rockefeller Institute, six experts gathered to discuss the implications of a newly identified atmospheric phenomenon: the rising level of carbon dioxide (CO2) caused by the burning of fossil fuels.
The COP28 text does not simply call for transitioning away from fossil fuels but rather stipulates that this transition must be “just, orderly, and equitable,” a much more challenging prospect.
The main pushback of substance I’ve had to my book Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future is that this era of clean energy abundance indeed is upon us, making manufactured food feasible and confining my arguments for agrarian localism and a small farm future to the dustbin of history. I doubt that, and in this post I’ll try to elucidate some of those doubts.
If we put all our efforts into creating a system of electric heat, what we’re going to produce is very little warmth for most people, a whole lot of wasted resources and toxic trash — and no capacity to produce any energy at all within a few decades.
The longer we wait to act, the higher the cliff, the more painful the landing, and the more difficult the transition to a steady state economy.
Despite the increasing depth and granularity of non-growth economic model research, one aspect is currently relatively under-represented in these efforts, namely the nature of the energy paradigm that could underpin societies operating in this form.
With the performance of individual AI-specialized computer chips now measured in TeraFLOPs, and thousands of these chips harnessed together in an AI server farm, the electricity consumption of AI is vast.
It has been apparent to anyone paying attention that Saudi Arabia was and would be limiting its oil production. We got another reminder last week.
We are running out of fuel. We need an urgent plan to contract our energy needs if we are to survive the impending crash; there will be no “clean” energy until governments come clean.
On this episode, Nate is joined by biophysical analyst Mario Giampietro to unpack his decades of research on a wide-lens view of the challenges facing the human system.
As the White House confirmed with the official release of its policy, all new licenses for LNG export terminals are hereby halted, until the policies used to figure out if they’re in the “public interest” can be updated to include modern economics and science.
It’s simple economics really. When you have less of something for which there is high demand, the price will go up.
