Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Kurt Cobb Haven’t we been hearing from the oil industry and from government and international agencies that worldwide oil production has been increasing in the last several years? The answer, of course, is yes. But, the deeper question is whether this assertion is actually correct.
What exactly was the industrial revolution? What changed, and what future awaits those changes?
“The American way of life,” George H.W. Bush infamously declared in 1992, “is not-negotiable.” This presents a problem if the American way of life is also unsustainable.
In the century and a half since transcendentalist thinker Henry David Thoreau first coined the term “voluntary poverty,” it has been variously a buzzword, a meme within environmental circles and a dreaded epithet smelling of sacrifice and deprivation.
The theme of last week’s post here on The Archdruid Report—the strategy of preserving or reviving technologies for the deindustrial future now, before the accelerating curve of decline makes that task more difficult than it already is—can be applied very broadly indeed.
The prodigious use of energy and production of waste forms the most fundamental conditions of possibility for the American way of life. All that we know and expect, value and demand, are not possible without all this consumption and this waste.
The one readily available way around the harsh economic impacts of fossil fuel depletion is the one that Gunnar Erikson tried, but did not live to complete—the strategy of keeping an older technology in use, or bringing a defunct technology back into service, while there’s still enough wealth sloshing across the decks of the industrial economy to make it relatively easy to do so.
In this essay I’ll present data on the energy intensity of animal- and plant-derived foods and hopefully contribute to a constructive dialog about what we ought to eat and how we ought to be producing it.
The nature of property insurance, with premiums reliant on projections of future claims and financial market performance, will pull forward the societal effects of climate change and energy constraints.
One of the things that reliably irritates a certain fraction of this blog’s readers, as I’ve had occasion to comment before, is my habit of using history as a touchstone that can be used to test claims about the future.
Net pay is what you have to pay your bills today. And, net energy is what society has in order to conduct its business (and its fun) on any given day. Is net energy still increasing?
Our social reality is a combined construct of what we directly observe, what others tell us directly, and the parallel realities created by the media.
