When Gloria Flora took the helm of Lewis & Clark National Forest in Montana in 1995, she found priceless wildlands threatened by oil and gas speculators. Defying convention, she declared the area off-limits to oil and gas development, adding a definitive new twist to the interplay between community groups, the fossil fuel industry, and the […]
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 […]
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 […]
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…
A recent series of studies and rebuttals have debated the greenhouse gas impacts of shale gas production as compared to coal. Here, Post Carbon Institute Fellow David Hughes, author of the groundbreaking report, “Will Natural Gas Fuel America in the 21st Century?”, provides an analysis of two conflicting studies. His conclusion: Shale gas is worse […]
There are currently no viable substitutes for oil at current rates of consumption. Although alternatives to oil do exist for many of its uses, they are generally vastly inferior to oil in their energy content and in the ease of which they can be extracted, transported, and turned into a commericaly-usable fuel. This is a […]
These articles are supplements to Will Natural Gas Fuel America in the 21st Century? (2013). They consider how the challenges posed by shale gas production have serious implications for the future of agriculture, transportation, and health in the United States. Summary Agriculture and Natural Gas By Michael Bomford The vast majority of natural gas supporting American […]