… 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 ReadingFor years, it has been puzzling to see commentators debating whether peak oil is a future possibility, when the U.S. Energy Information Administration (DOE/ EIA) data showed world crude oil production peaking in 2005.
Continue ReadingClick here for a downloadable, printable PDF version My attention was called recently to a Department of State position paper that said simply that “The U.S. does not endorse population ‘stabilization’ or ‘control.’ The ‘ideal’ family size should be determined by the desires of couples, not governments.” That is not just a major retrograde step; it is a particularly bad …
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 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 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 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.
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