2009 Japan prize honors lead author of ‘”The Limits to Growth”

Dr. Dennis Meadows, lead scientist and co-author of The Limits to Growth (1972) and its subsequent updates, is the winner of this year’s Japan Prize from the Science and Technology Foundation of Japan for “Transformation towards a sustainable society in harmony with nature.” This prestigious award is given once a year to people from all parts of the world whose original and outstanding achievements in science and technology are recognized as having advanced the frontiers of knowledge and served the cause of peace and prosperity for humankind.

A prince and four peaks: peak oil, gas, coal and uranium

Today the second three-day world future energy summit began in Abu Dhabi. One of the biggest energy conference in the world that is being attended by key policy makers, financiers, leading academics and no less than 400 journalists from all over the world. The conference was opened by the Dutch Crown Prince Willem-Alexander, Prince of Orange and the Netherlands…

Hope and fear

Mr. Obama’s first task taking stage in the lonely Oval Office should be to get right with his own credo of “change,” meaning he’ll have to persuade the broad American public that the “change” required to salvage this society runs much deeper, colder, and thicker than they’d imagine in their initial transports over hallelujah-Bush-is-Gone. Many of the familiar touchstones of the recent American experience have got to go.

Peak-oil activist approach for the coming change in culture

To live with as little petroleum and other non-renewable resources as possible right now is to embrace a new world of localized economics and a lower-tech set of practices and processes formerly termed Appropriate Technology. But if we instead hope for as little change as possible in the near future, we will probably bring on the worst consequences of recent decades’ energy gluttony.