Lindsay Curren

How to talk about the end of growth: Interview with Richard Heinberg

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“Traditional” economic measurements and the dominant paradigm no longer work in a world of peak debt, peak energy and peak disasters. Can a new way of talking shift things? My interview with Richard Heinberg, Senior Fellow of Post Carbon Institute on his latest book The End of Growth: Adapting to Our New Economic Reality. He’s diagnosed the problem. Now, how to communicate the issue to everyday folks and policy makers? Heinberg weighs in.

The road to Europe: movements and democracy

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Europe’s crisis is a crisis of democracy. The ‘democracy of the experts’ cannot deliver: representative democracy is incapable of channelling demands in the political system. More participatory and deliberative democracy is needed, as argued in Europe’s public spaces by the movements of ‘ indignados’.

Arrested at the White House: Acting as a living tribute to Martin Luther King

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We may not be facing the same dangers Dr. King did, but we’re getting some small sense of the kind of courage he and the rest of the civil rights movement had to display in their day — the courage to put your body where your beliefs are. It feels good.

How I learned to start worrying and hate the tar sands pipeline

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Bill McKibben sure is making a big deal over a commodity piece of oil infrastructure. He and more than 200 climate activists think it’s worth getting arrested to stop TransCanada from building the Keystone XL Pipeline. Sure, tar sands are uber-dirty. But with such a low energy return, won’t high costs just make them go away on their own? That’s what I always assumed. But now I’m starting to think this thing could be bad. Really bad.

Energy and water – the real blue-chips

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Todays prices and costs provide a very bad basis for making investment decisions because they reflect temporary relative market scarcities rather than long-run underlying physical ones. The world needs to abandon money as its measure for determining energy and economic policy if it is to invest its scarcest, most limiting resources in the best possible way.

Planning for Irene

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If you live in the Eastern US, particularly, but not exclusively the eastern coastal US, you need to be prepared for quite a storm…We don’t always get a heads up like this about a potential threat – so many come unexpected upon us. When we do, it behooves us to remember that there’s a lot we can do to keep safe, secure and be ready – and that lives depend on us taking action. The actions are simple, and easily become part of our basic routine – just like keeping school records or feeding the pets. But now is the time – whether you live in Irene’s path or not, to make sure your preps are ready – so that you don’t have to ask for help unless you really need it, so you can help others, so you can make sure that resources go to the most vulnerable.

Citywatch: Taking the nature cure

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Once regional planners come alive to the planning considerations of cities designed for mental health, human scale and biophilic connections, they need to locate spaces and activities that can make pay the freight of high-spaced city land. This, in my opinion, is where urban agriculture wins its day in the sun. What Swiss army knives and scarves are to multi-tasking in the wilds, urban agriculture is to multi-tasking in the cities, which is how it pays down the high cost of urban land to support it.

Low Carbon and Economic Growth: Are both compatible in developing economies?

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At the intersection of global energy depletion and concerns about human impact on the environment lie some serious and oft overlooked issues. Largely gone from our public discourse is the idea that oil is infinite. It is now accepted, even to previous staunch cornucopians, that increasing, or even maintaining oil production will come only at higher costs. The new response to the energy/environmental crisis is to transition to a green economy, replacing our declining stocks of fossil sunlight with new technologies able to harness our current sunlight in its various forms. That these renewable technologies are available, viable and becoming more popular is not in question – however, whether these low carbon strategies can combine with now more expensive fossil fuels to maintain a growth trajectory for both the developed and developing worlds is another question entirely.