Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Author Richard Heinberg’s nine books include The Party’s Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies and Peak Everything: Waking Up to the Century of Declines. He discusses what we know about peak oil, as well as its connection to the end of economic growth.
We are living through “interesting times”; credit crises, recession and rising debt threaten to destabilise nation states. Whilst reckless bankers and traders might have a certain amount of responsibility, if we are to understand the larger processes that are driving these trends we need to stand back and look at the human system as a whole. Change is inevitable – it’s one of the implications of the Laws of Thermodynamics. What we need to understand is the way human ecology works within these natural physical processes, how the contradictions between human systems and these natural processes define what is “unsustainable”, and what this means for our future as we adjust to the natural limitations of our environment.
– Peak oil alarm revealed by secret official talks
– What if there’s much less coal than we think?
– Peak Everything – a libertarian view
– Go solar before it’s too late!
– Think OPEC exports won’t decline? You’re living in a dreamworld
Every society attempts to determine which risks will be borne by the individual and which will be borne by the community. My task is to convince you that the idea of individual risk is flawed, and that to the extent we organize our society around it we are being hoodwinked by a false libertarian ideology, one that tells us there are choices available to the individual the consequences of which will fall only to that individual.
A good case can now be made that the year 2007, when this book originally appeared, was indeed the year, if not of “peak everything,” then at least of “peak many things.” Since then we have begun a scary descent from the giddy heights of consumption achieved in the early years of this century.
This is a German translation of the essay Beyond the Limits to Growth by Richard Heinberg which will appear in the forthcoming Post Carbon Reader. Im Jahre 1972 erkundete das inzwischen klassische Buch “Grenzen des Wachstums” die Konsequenzen des exponentiellen Wachstums von Bevölkerung, Industrialisierung, Umweltverschmutzung und Ressourcenverbrauch.# Dieses Buch, bis heute unangetastet der Bestseller unter den Umweltbüchern, berichtete über die ersten Versuche, Computer zur Modellierung der Trends bei den Interaktionen von Ressourcen, Verbrauch und Bevölkerung zu nutzen.
The Transition Movement in the ‘West’ (and therefore North) has for the most part been unable to conceptualise a response to the human development and social justice needs of the South. Much of this lack has to do with the very formidable inertness which western societies inherited from the transformations wrought by the Industrial Revolution, and the apparently incontrovertible ideas of ‘progress’ and ‘growth.’
Left unaddressed during the past 3 years in most of the debates between economists has been the problem of energy. The reason is simple: post-war economists don’t do energy, except as an ever-expanding resource that the credit system and technology makes available. For the post-war economist, the supply curve of energy–save for brief lags–is always coming back into rough equilibrium with the economy.
What kind of life do you want, and what are you willing to do to get it? Keith Farnish, author of Time’s Up! An Uncivilized Solution to a Global Crisis, sees industrial civilization as the most destructive way of living yet devised by humans. And it’s over: environmental degradation and depletion tell us it can’t continue. The system has myriad ways to make us believe we can’t live without it. But Keith believes we can – there are countless ways to move forward into contented, happy, and full lives. We can “disengage” and reconnect with the natural world, ourselves, and others.
In 1972, the now-classic book Limits to Growth explored the consequences for Earth’s ecosystems of exponential growth in population, industrialization, pollution, food production, and resource depletion. That book, which still stands as the best-selling environmental title ever published, reported on the first attempts to use computers to model the likely interactions between trends in resources, consumption, and population. It summarized the first major scientific study to question the assumption that economic growth can and will continue more or less uninterrupted into the foreseeable future.
Dave Pollard’s latest at Salon is an interesting cry in the dark about how hard it is to connect with others when you see collapse coming. My guess is that some of my readers will respond with a great deal of identification, while others will be annoyed by Pollard – but I think it bears some considering.
With 20 percent of the world’s population but just 7 percent of its available freshwater, China faces serious water shortages as its economy booms and urbanization increases. The government is planning massive water diversion projects, but environmentalists say conservation — especially in the wasteful agricultural sector — is the key.
