Energy Basics: Electricity, Generation and Grid Management

If you have found yourself occasionally challenged to follow some of the more technical conversations we have here, or even if you just want to brush up on the fundamentals, this mini-series is for you! We hope these episodes will give you a bit more familiarity with the terms and concepts of energy, and help to fill in some of the knowledge that you were never offered in school.

I’m Sian, and I’m a fossil fuel addict: on paradox, disavowal and (im)possibility in changing climate change

In the famous 12-steps of Alcoholics Anonymous and associated programmes, the first step is to recognise that you are indeed addicted. That you are bound to a substance over which you do not have control, such that this substance has become your ‘higher power’, its material qualities and structures of access determining one’s activities and choices in the world.

As Trump Leaves Permian Oilfield, Industry Insiders Question If 2020 Bust Marks Texas Oil’s Last Big Boom

Today, the shale boom of the 2010’s is officially bust, battered not only by the ’s outsized failure to control COVID-19 outbreaks and an oil price war in which foreign producers proved their ability to steer oil prices, but also a wave of multi-billion dollar write-downs by oil giants

Bigger Cuts for Manchester – in its Annual Greenhouse Gas Emissions

The point also cannot be made often enough that though challenging, this budget is unjust. By continuing to emit even at these lower rates, countries like the UK are saying to the countries of the global South – we’ll continue to use your just share of permissible emissions until the point at which the world as a whole has to have stopped emitting.

The Big Rebuild: One-Week Zero-Carbon Home Makeovers and Setting New Comfort Levels

The incorporation of Fanger’s equations into building codes to create a set-point for comfort not only locks in assumptions that only apply to a male, suited minority, but also a level of energy use and hence carbon emissions which, in aggregate, contribute to the climate emergency.

Doom or denial: Is there another path?

My conclusion, after years of studying environmental research literature, is that some form of societal collapse is indeed highly probable this century, depending on how we define “collapse.” … Collapse needn’t imply that nearly everybody dies at once, or that the survivors become wandering cannibals. Rather, it means our current institutions will fail to one degree or another and we will have to find alternative ways to meet basic human needs—ways that are slower, smaller in scale, and more local.