How Economic Growth Fails
Our economy is like a pump that works increasingly slowly over time, as diminishing returns and other adverse influences affect its operation. Eventually, it is likely to stop.
Gail Tverberg
How Sustainable Can Cities be When They Can’t Even Deal With Their Own Shit?
Cities of all sizes are built upon sewage systems based on an array of fossil fuel inputs – and the levees are starting to overflow. Time to give this a re-think.
The Suicide of the American Left
If the best you can offer the voters is a choice between what they have now and something worse, and what they have now is already pretty wretched, you’re not likely to get much traction.
Re-Imagining Climate Justice at the COP: Finding Our Frontlines at a Gathering in Bellagio, Italy
We should be trying to identify the strategies that give us the best chances of creating “tipping points” in the climate wars. I dream of a movement that can create a non-linear trajectory into the future… One idea … is a COP21-focused campaign for “Just Climate Futures: Saying No in Paris.” The best “outcome” for the COP would be NO treaty/agreement.
A Day of Tears: Report from the “sHell No!” Action in Portland, Oregon
This week, activists in Portland, Oregon, employed non-violent civil disobedience to delay the departure of a Royal Dutch Shell ship delivering equipment essential for commencing its oil-drilling operations in the Arctic Sea. Eye-witness account and analysis.
We are all Greece
The cast of heroes and villains in Greece’s ongoing battle to save its economy varies depending on who’s telling the story.
The Cimmerian Hypothesis, Part Three: The End of the Dream
Cities are thus the Petri dishes in which civilizations ripen their ideas to maturity—and like Petri dishes, they do this by excluding contaminating influences.
The Cimmerian Hypothesis, Part Two: A Landscape of Hallucinations
People raised in urban environments come to treat their mental models as realities, more real than the often-unruly facts on the ground, because everything they encounter in their immediate environments reinforces those models.
Is Democracy Hitting the Fossil Fuels too Hard?
Industrial civilization and its fossil fuels have allowed for a lacksadaisy modern way of life that places an overwhelmingly stronger inclination on the various guises of narcissism than on genuine civic participation, leading to a crisis of democracy.
What Greece, Cyprus, and Puerto Rico Have in Common
We all know one thing that Greece, Cyprus, and Puerto Rico have in common–severe financial problems. There is something else that they have in common–a high proportion of their energy use is from oil.
Neither Crowdfunding, Nor Oxi, Nor Anything Else Can Stave Off Greece’s Systemic Collapse
A recent crowdfunding campaign to bail out Greece does little more than obfuscate the role that energy shortages play in Greece’s systemic collapse.
Darwin’s Casino
Our age has no shortage of curious features, but for me, at least, one of the oddest is the way that so many people these days don’t seem to be able to think through the consequences of their own beliefs.
