Tom Whipple

Optimism, harsh realism, and blind spots—10 years later

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Ten years ago, energy analyst Steve Andrews challenged widely respected energy guru Amory Lovins via email for what Andrews thought was an overly optimistic vision—about coal consumption trends, evolution in the auto industry, future world oil production, etc.—articulated in the Rocky Mountain Institute‘s Spring 2000 newsletter. …Ten years later, read it for the blind spots everyone had.

New thinking on BP spill: Declare a holiday!

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The BP spill demands a far more significant response than ongoing cleanups, unsuccessful attempts to plug the gushing oil, and desperate efforts to mitigate the multitude of impacts from the biggest oil catastrophe in U.S. history. The BP spill demands a paradigm shift in how we run our economy and carry out our governance. Historians will one day look back on this spill as the nadir of governmental regulatory performance, in which oil companies commandeered and corrupted the Interior Department oil leasing program. So what’s the response we need to get the paradigm shift going? How about declaring a new holiday?

Another Farmer Jane! Lisa Kivirist

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Lisa Kivirist is a bonafide Farmer Jane in Wisconsin where she runs her family farm with the help of her husband and son Liam. Off grid and creative, she and her husband have figured out how to make a living in a rural place — something that’s not really easy to do. Lisa is also a Kellogg Food and Society Policy Fellow specializing in the role of women in agriculture and speaks on the subject frequently.

The Oil Spill and You

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Most of us have not bothered to comprehend the yawning gulf that lies between our best intentions and our abject dependence on the wealth-producing properties of petroleum. Nor how this addiction fills us with delusions of godlike mastery over our environment while blinding us to the reality that we humans have grossly overshot our planet’s carrying capacity.

Dear Candidate – What will you do if growth is over…?

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To me, one of the most surreal phenomena one encounters these days is that no country, no established economic research institute (that I’m aware of), and no international organization (such as the IMF) publicly discusses scenarios that don’t plan for a return to stable economic (GDP) growth. Even Greece’s government, after 2012, expects growth, which would allow the country to slowly reduce its monster debt load. Similarly, the U.S. government forecasts annual average (real) growth rates of 4.4% for the years 2012-2014, and 2.4% thereafter until 2020. This theme is globally ubiquitous.