… or perhaps ahead of schedule. Climate change is the popular topic, and there are multiple news reports of the accelerated pace of change: the melting Arctic ice cap; the sudden and erratic increase in run-off from Greenland’s glaciers; the breakup of the Ross ice shelf in the Antarctic; the droughts of 2005 and 2010 in the Amazon; the storms …
Continue ReadingScientists have long recognized the population problem, and most of the world’s national scientific societies have warned against continued growth.
Continue ReadingThe ancient Greeks used the word hubris to describe vaulting pride that challenged even the gods.
Continue ReadingClick here for a downloadable, printable PDF version The country is presently absorbed in the financial crisis. We have, as usual, pretty well forgotten all the other issues that had been or should have been worrying us: fossil energy decline and the coming energy transition; climate change and its impacts; a growing water crisis; threats to U.S. food production; the …
Continue ReadingClick here for a downloadable, printable PDF version Continuing world population growth was a huge but unacknowledged elephant in the conference hall at the June 2008 UN-Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) Summit in Rome on World Food Security: The Challenges of Climate Change and Bioenergy. Remarkably, only a handful of the more than 200 heads of government, foreign ministers, ambassadors and ministers of agriculture, development and trade …
Continue ReadingThe name of the abyss is energy.
Continue ReadingCivilizations have overused their resources before, and collapsed or moved on, but never on a scale remotely resembling the present threat, and now the Earth is full.
Continue ReadingIn the film An Inconvenient Truth, ex vice-president Al Gore presents the facts about climate change. It is a bravura performance. He makes use of brilliant presentational techniques to put before us all relevant current knowledge about climate change. He lightens the factual burden with humour, and by including some interesting
Continue ReadingOnce it was the word on everyone’s lips, now “population” is the environmental issue that dares not speak its name. David Nicholson-Lord raises the flag for an unfashionable concern. Are you worried about population growth? Then you’re in the minority. Mention it as an issue to any gathering of environmentalists these days, and the reactions will range from a thinly …
Continue ReadingClick here for a downloadable, printable PDF version Viewed superficially, humanity’s material condition and prospects have never looked better. Modernization and affluence are unprecedentedly democratized. A more penetrating examination, however, reveals that humanity is hideously vulnerable, that its present course cannot long endure, and that a radically different type of economy is urgently needed. I. Our Growth Economy is Unsustainable …
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