If you’re someone who’s curious about the geopolitical implications of carbon fuel and the ecological havoc it wreaks, you’ve probably come across some of Richard Heinberg‘s work. This week on Sea Change Radio, we speak with this senior fellow at the Post Carbon Institute who has authored over 13 books and regularly ponders the past and future of humanity and the earth in his Museletter. We discuss the global debt crunch, the search for tight oil, and the concomitant acceleration of climate change. Heinberg also tells us his thoughts on negative emissions technologies and regenerative agriculture, and explains why he refers to the past ten years as “our bonus decade.”
Environment
Richard Heinberg on Our Bonus Decade
By Alex Wise, Richard Heinberg, originally published by Sea Change Radio
December 18, 2018
Alex Wise
Alex Wise is the host and executive producer of Sea Change Radio, a nationally-distributed interview-format radio show concerned with the advances being made toward a more environmentally sustainable world, economy, and future.
Tags: climate change, debt-based economies, tight oil
Related Articles
Uncomfortable Questions in Unstable Times
By Nate Hagens, The Great Simplification
This week’s Frankly marks a new recurring segment on this platform where Nate poses questions about our shared future: Uncomfortable Questions in Unstable Times. In this edition, he explores what would change if societies shifted their primary goal from growth to stability.
February 17, 2026
Ragnarök revisited
By Chris Smaje, Small Farm Future
We don’t really see the violence that historically underlay and still underlies the globalised ‘free’ trade that defines the modern world because a lot of effort has gone into forgetting it. Better, I’d argue, to embrace the role of the settled local farmer-householder (which in fact many of the Vikings were too) who knows how to produce their own livelihood from the land.
February 17, 2026
The Empire Crumbles Part II: Creative Dissidence and Mutual Aid
By Richard Heinberg, Resilience.org
Currently, global breakdown is being accelerated primarily by an ongoing and worsening political calamity in the United States. In this article, we’ll go to the frontlines of conflict in Minneapolis to see how people are responding to a violent—even deadly—government-imposed crisis.
February 17, 2026




















