limits to growth

The speech Obama needed to make

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I’ve stayed away from politics pointedly in posts, because voting for either party is still just voting for growth, with different labels applied. I do not believe that the current corporate giveaway that we call a political system is fixable unless we elect a leader who is ecologically and energetically literate. I doubt that will happen. That said, here is an earth day wish for real servant leadership which would fix our problems. The post is directed at a specific leader, Obama, since the United States is the worst offender in terms of extreme behavior and unsustainability.

Before the fall? Terminal Capitalism: Part 2

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In the first part of this series about "terminal capitalism," we saw a collection of evidence that the global system of capitalism, the organized basis for most world trade, is in deep trouble. The situation has become so serious and the problems so self-evident that the polls show many average American citizens are questioning the viability of capitalism itself.

Should the last few years have updated your idea of peak oil?

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Nate Hagens draws my attention to this recent interview with Dennis Meadows, lead author of the famous Limits to Growth series of books. Meadows is very pessimistic. I was particularly interested in his views on oil production and peak oil, in which he states positively that peak oil is in the past (which is very arguable at best, given that oil production is still making new monthly highs), and also that "Oil production will be reduced approximately by half in the next 20 years, even with the exploitation of oil sands or shale oil."

Follow nature and avoid collapse

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“The economic relationships between and among communities at the level of the biosphere are sympathetic and circumstantial,” LaConte writes.
By contrast, industrial capitalism has led to a perfect storm of problems — climate change, peak oil, overpopulation, species extinction heading the list — that LaConte has dubbed Critical Mass…

How can we link monetary systems to the natural world?

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Money may not grow on trees, but it does grow at a much faster rate – particularly when created by banks as interest-bearing debt. In modern economies, nearly all money is created in this way. To maintain a stable money supply, debtors must repay both the initial loan and the interest on the loan. This means we need either economic growth at a rate in line with the interest on the debt and/or inflation, both of which we’ve had a great deal of in the past century. But back in the real, natural world, there are limits to growth. The ultimate limit is energy, something all production requires. Humans require food to survive and re-produce. To create this food we need energy, energy that comes, ultimately, from the sun.