Nuclear power has gained renewed traction in recent years as the world’s countries seek climate-friendly alternatives to fossil fuels. But public health risks, continued dependence on public subsidies, and the seemingly intractable problem of long-term nuclear waste storage make nuclear power a poor solution to our energy needs. This is a chapter from The ENERGY […]

What magic, or monster, lurks behind the light switch and the gas pump? Where does the seemingly limitless energy that fuels modern society come from? From oil spills, nuclear accidents, mountaintop removal coal mining, and natural gas “fracking” to large-scale wind, solar, and biomass plants, every source of energy has costs. In a large-format, photo-driven […]

Foreword by Van Jones. More than ninety percent of the electricity we use to light our communities, and nearly all the energy we use to run our cars, heat our homes, and power our factories comes from large, centralized, highly polluting, nonrenewable sources of energy. It doesn’t have to be that way. In Power from […]

In The End of Growth, published in September 2011, Richard Heinberg, made the observation that world economic expansion, which has been barreling along for the past few decades, is now stalling. The book further claimed that this is not an outcome we can prevent; we can only choose whether and how to adapt. He argued […]

As a contribution to this ongoing refinement of the concept, I recently formulated five axioms (self-evident truths) of sustainability. My goal was simply to distill ideas that had been proposed previously and put them into a concise, easy-to-understand form. The First Axiom Any society that continues to use critical resources unsustainably will collapse. Exception: A […]

Foreword by Peter Buffett. Americans’ long-term savings in stocks, bonds, mutual funds, pension funds, and life insurance funds total about $30 trillion. But not even 1 percent of these savings touch local small business—even though roughly half the jobs and the output in the private economy come from them. So, how can people increasingly concerned […]

Many people would agree that the central desirable end of economic activity is a high quality of life for this and future generations.  Conventional economists argue that humans are insatiable, and therefore economics should focus on endless economic growth and ever-increasing consumption.  Considerable evidence, however, suggests that humans are in fact satiable&emdash;there is a point […]

The debt-based money system just described cannot work if there is less and less energy available.  We only borrow if we think we’re going to have more money in future with which to repay, and a society as a whole cannot expect to have more money unless there is economic growth, or inflation, or a […]

But living now in relative abundance, when the whole world is a shopping mall and our appetites are no longer constrained by limited resources, our craving for reward–be that for money, the fat and sugar of fast food, or for the novel gadgetry of modern technology–has become a liability and a hunger that has no […]

Humans may pride themselves as being the best evidence for intelligent life on Earth, but an alien observer would record that the (un)sustainability conundrum has the global community floundering in a swamp of cognitive dissonance and collective denial…