After 18 months, the U.S. Presidential election is just a week away and, with one notable exception, we at PCI have remained largely silent on it. That’s not because we deem it unimportant or are worried about upsetting readers...
Predicting the future is a fool’s errand, but everybody does it. As long as we’ve had language—for tens of thousands of years, at last estimate—we’ve been able to formulate the question, “What will tomorrow bring?” The answers have ranged...
Casey Cox, Executive Director of the Flint River Partnership, checks the control panel on a sprinkler system equipped with advanced irrigation scheduling technology. Photo by Sandra Postel Casey Cox, who hails from a family with five generations of farming...
Modern communications systems send information across vast distances in massive quantities at breathtaking speeds. Every sector of the economy depends on the capture, access, and rapid transmission of information: from stock market quotes to weather forecasts; from orders for...
Movie buffs will recognize this title as the most memorable line from “A Few Good Men” (1992), spoken by the character Colonel Jessep, played by Jack Nicholson (“You can’t handle the truth!” is #29 in the American Film Institute’s...
Daniel Lerch Hillary Brown Warren Karlenzig
Transportation accounts for over 40% of U.S. energy end use, and over 95% of that transportation runs on oil. Lighting, heating and cooling buildings also consumes an enormous amount of energy, much (but not all) of it powered by...
While its slice of the overall energy pie may seem relatively low, the modern American food system is figuratively awash in fossil fuels. On average, roughly 12 calories of (mostly fossil fuel) energy go into producing just one calorie...
Amid all the mayhem and turmoil of recent weeks, here’s a news story you may have missed. The Romanian parliament unanimously passed an amendment to the country’s “Law on the Sale of Food Products” bill which states that every...
Image via U.S. Navy photo by Photographer’s Mate 1st Class Arlo K. Abrahamson. Creative Commons. In February 2003, in Dublin, I marched against the impending Iraq War alongside 100,000 other people. Similar protests took place around the world that day,...
The creation of the consumer economy—a complex, interconnected system of institutions, goals, rewards, and punishments—was one of the great social projects of the twentieth century, when energy was cheaply abundant and two of our chief economic problems were overproduction...