Clinton reads Heinberg on peak oil

By David Remnick, originally published by The New Yorker

September 17, 2006

This week in the magazine, David Remnick profiles Bill Clinton. Here, with Blake Eskin, Remnick discusses the ex-President’s legacy and Hillary Clinton’s political future.

…

Bill Eskin: You write that Clinton rejected Gerald Ford as a model for the post-Presidency. But is Clinton at all a man of leisure?

David Remnick: He plays a hell of a lot of golf and he’s a voracious reader. His library’s got a lot of books about policy, a lot of history, a lot of Presidential biography, and a lot of books on religion—that’s a sincere interest. His taste in fiction, although I don’t think it’s limited to this, seems to be of a lower brow: he loves thrillers and police novels and stuff like that.

I borrowed a book from him that he had just read—“The Party’s Over: Oil, War, and the Fate of Industrial Societies,” by Richard Heinberg, not exactly summer reading—and it was full of underlinings and what looked like the most serious undergraduate’s markings, with lots of exclamation points.

David Remnick

Tags: Activism, Education, Energy Policy, Politics

Robert Jensen argues that ‘fewer and less’ is unavoidable. But the future is not fixed

By Matthew R. Sanderson, Resilience.org

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.

October 1, 2026

A future of ‘fewer and less’ may be unavoidable. But how do we get there humanely?

By Robert Jensen, Savage Minds

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.

September 16, 2026

Affordability, not scarcity, is the real energy crisis

By Gail Tverberg, Our Finite World

In this post, I examine differences in economic behaviour by comparing two types of periods: those with low energy affordability and those with high energy affordability.

August 26, 2026

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