Price for Denial, Inaction on Climate Is Higher Than Toll of Reducing Consumption

By Karen Rybold-Chin, originally published by on the earth productions

March 14, 2013

NOTE: Images in this archived article have been removed.

Image RemovedFor Tad Patzek, Peak Oil – not climate change – poses the greatest risk to human health and survival on Earth. The chair of the Department of Petroleum and Geosystems Engineering at the University of Texas and co-author with Joseph Tainter of Drilling Down: The Gulf Oil Debacle and Our Energy Dilemma, Patzek does not deny climate change or the notion that the human use of CO2 has helped caused it. It’s just that climate change has already been set in motion, and it will take 80,000 to 100,000 years to reverse it. This is, the Polish-born Patzek says, "for us, an infinite time."

Karen Rybold-Chin

Tags: climate change, peak oil

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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