B O O K  R E V I E W  On Track to Dystopia    2045: A Story of Our Future, by Peter Seidel; Prometheus Books: Amherst, NY, 2009; ISBN 978-1-59102-705-8 An environmental architect and planner and longtime population activist, Peter Seidel has written a troubling work of speculative fiction about environmental and social conditions in the U.S. and …
Continue ReadingNothing gets people’s attention more than being elected President of the United States.
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 ReadingClick here for a downloadable, printable PDF version The Energy Watch Group (EWG) in Germany has produced the most detailed and most disquieting study I have yet seen of the future of world coal production. They start, as do most writers on the future of coal, from the national statistical data compiled by the World Energy Council (WEC), but they …
Continue ReadingImmigration is currently very much a hot-button item at the local level, the state level, and nationally. Public discussions generally focus on three separate aspects of immigration;
1) law and order, 2) economic, 3) humanitarian.
Continue ReadingClick here for a downloadable, printable PDF version In the 1950s, Shell Oil geologist M. King Hubbert predicted that oil production in the United States would peak about 1970 and thereafter inescapably drift downward. He was generally derided, but production did indeed peak in 1970. After that, several other petroleum geologists applied “Hubbert’s curve” to world recoverable oil resources, and …
Continue ReadingThis paper was written in the Summer of 2006 after Congressional debate on comprehensive immigration reform and following passage of legislation in both the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate.
Continue ReadingImmigration in all its many forms has in the last two decades become the main driver of America’s excessive population growth.
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