Limits to Growth: Where We Are and What to Do About It
In this talk, Nate Hagens synthesizes the current landscape of global energy, environment and financial risks while offering suggestions on what to do as a hominid living on a full planet. He raises the question of whether it is...
What the Disappearing Aral Sea Tells Us about the Value of Water
The satellite image of the Aral Sea recently released by NASA just about knocked my socks off. It wasn’t that the sea was shrinking; that’s been true for decades. It was how fast it was disappearing. Once the world’s...
Paul Krugman and the Limits of Hubris
Economist Paul Krugman evidently feels irked and irritated by the notion that there might be limits to economic expansion: he has followed up his New York Times op-ed of September 18 (“Errors and Emissions,” to which I replied here)...
Rivers Need a Thorough Health Exam
Rivers are the blue arteries of the Earth. Their flows deliver sediment and nutrients to floodplains, deltas and coastal zones, some of the most biologically productive ecosystems on the planet. They connect and sustain the web of life. So...
Heinberg on KCPW The Rundown
Post Carbon Senior Fellow Richard Heinberg was interviewed on The Rundown on Our New Economic Reality. Segment begins at 6 minutes.
Paul Krugman’s Errors and Omissions
In a New York Times op-ed published September 18 titled “Errors and Emissions,” economist-columnist Paul Krugman took a swipe at my organization, Post Carbon Institute, lumping us together with the Koch brothers as purveyors of “climate despair.” No, the...
With 38% of Global Shale Gas Located in Regions of Water Stress, More Oversight of Fracking is Urgently Needed
As more data emerge, shale gas increasingly appears to be in the cross-hairs of the water-energy nexus, and far too little is being done to defuse impending conflicts. While hydraulic fracturing (or “fracking”), the process used to unleash natural gas from...
The Peak Oil Crisis: It‘s All Around Us
Ten years ago peak oil was assumed to be a rather straightforward, transparent process. What was then thought of as “oil” production was going to stop growing around the middle of the last decade. Shortages were going to occur;...
The “Upstream” Story that Hasn’t Been Told
After ten years as Product Policy Institute we changed our organization’s name to UPSTREAM at the end of 2013. We changed our name to emphasize that critical environmental solutions to reducing environmental impacts of products – manufactured goods and...
Fracking May Be Worse Than Burning Coal
If you’re a politician, science is a bitch; it resists spin. And a new set of studies—about, of all things, a simple molecule known as CH4—show that President Obama’s climate change strategy is starting to unravel even as it’s...