Bill McKibben

The Cuba Diet: What will you be eating when the revolution comes?

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[Cuba has] created what may be the world’s largest working model of a semi-sustainable agriculture, one that doesn’t rely nearly as heavily as the rest of the world does on oil, on chemicals, on shipping vast quantities of food back and forth… No one’s predicting a collapse like the one Cuba endured – probably no modern economy has ever undergone such a shock. But if things got gradually harder? … It’s somehow useful to know that someone has already run the experiment.

Current food production system due for collapse

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World grain yield fell for four successive years from 2000 to 2003, bringing reserves to the lowest in thirty years… The Independent Science Panel (ISP) and the Institute of Science in Society (ISIS) are launching a Sustainable World initiative to engage with all sectors of civil society to make our food production system truly sustainable.

A spike in prices, a peak to output – will oil be the downfall of global growth?

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What we cannot see is whether this expansionary phase [will be] stifled by an oil squeeze, by a more general burst of inflation, by a loss of confidence in the markets, or conceivably by a trade war. What we can see is that oil at over $50 a barrel is an amber light, and were it to rise to over $100, the light would flip to red.

Fuel Cells – A Perspective

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With their promise of environmentally benign power, fuel cells are widely promoted as the electricity generators of the future. Technological advances over several decades have demonstrated that they can certainly be made to work but their central claim of exceptionally high efficiency does not always stand up to scientific scrutiny. Expectations that fuel cells will be simple and cheap seem unrealistic.