“Peak oil” – when petroleum extraction globally reaches its maximum and begins an inevitable decline – may be near, and the consequences are likely to be devastating to societies accustomed to abundant, inexpensive fossil fuels. Petroleum is the world’s...
We have founded our present society upon delusional assumptions of limitlessness. Our national faith is a sort of autistic industrialism. This necessarily leads to limitless violence, waste, war, and destruction. Our great need now is for sciences and technologies...
Industrial-scale wind and solar power projects can produce significant quantities of renewable energy, but distributed renewable energy generation—particularly rooftop photovoltaic installations—can achieve the same objective much faster without the environmental harm and at lower cost. With state and federal...
Oil shales, if they live up to proponents’ expectations and can be produced commercially, could change the economic and political fortunes of the United States and transform the geopolitical map of the world. But any large-scale effort to exploit...
As a species, we must learn to live within the physical limitations of the biosphere. In the electric energy sector, this requires reversing the worldwide trend of ever‑expanding electricity supply grids carrying energy vast distances from more and more...
A natural gas production boom made possible by new technology — horizontal drilling and hydrofracking — is being touted as a “game changer” in the energy landscape. It also portends massive damage for families, communities, and wildlife as drilling-related...
The natural resource perhaps most important to the character of the West is the region’s wide-open spaces, but that sense of remoteness is being eroded by the bulldozers and drilling rigs sweeping across the region. Oil and gas development...
Energy return on investment (EROI) is the ratio of energy returned from an energy-gathering activity compared to the energy invested in that process. While EROI by itself is not enough to judge the virtues or vices of particular fuels...
Globalization has largely been seen in the context of the outsourcing of information technologies. But the larger outsourcing that globalization is leading to is the outsourcing of pollution and the energy-intensive production of goods. The corporations and consumers of...
The coal industry’s slick advertisements promoting “clean coal” employ twenty-first century media techniques to keep us locked into a nineteenth century energy economy. A classic greenwashing campaign, it uses the iconography of sexy technology and down-home Americana to maintain...
