World energy policy is gripped by a fallacy — the idea that coal is destined to stay cheap for decades to come. This assumption supports investment in ‘clean-coal’ technology and trumps serious efforts to increase energy conservation and develop alternative energy sources. It is an important enough assumption about our energy future that it demands closer examination. [...more]
Contrary to what those in power would like you to believe so that you'll give up your pension, cut your wages, and settle for the life your great-grandparents had, America is not broke. Not by a long shot. The country is awash in wealth and cash. It's just that it's not in your hands. It has been transferred, in the greatest heist in history, from the workers and consumers to the banks and the portfolios of the uber-rich. [...more]
The three strands of the radical right — the hatemongers, the nativists and the antigovernment zealots — grew by 22% last year and 40% the year before. [...more]
The IEA has known about looming Peak Oil issues for more than a decade and is only now explicitly recognizing the idea in their public documents. People inside and outside of the IEA say that the organization has downplayed both the timing and potential severity of Peak Oil. Peak Conventional Oil has already happened [...more]
To anyone who is paying attention, things look doomed. Fortunately for American capitalism, nobody is paying attention. They never have. [...more]
Ecological collapse is all around. But faith in economic growth as the only path to prosperity shows no sign of fading. Wayne Ellwood examines the folly of endless growth on a finite planet. [...more]
Call a general strike. Riot. Shut down the city centers. Toss the bastards out. Do not be afraid of the language of class warfare-the rich versus the poor, the oligarchs versus the citizens, the capitalists versus the proletariat. The Greeks, unlike most of us, get it [...more]
Like the word green , sustainable or sustainability has become the buzzword of the millennia. Corporations and governments of the left or right feel compelled to dress up the most ecologically invasive development proposal or economic activity with assurances that it is sustainable . But there is ultimately only one sustainability . The sustainability of the whole, not its constituent parts. [...more]
Idiots. Morons. Blockheads. Numbskulls. Nothing quite captures the mind-withering stupidity of what has just happened in Doha. Swayed by Japan and a number of other countries, some of them doubtless bought off in traditional fashion, the members of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (Cites) have decided not to protect the Atlantic bluefin tuna. [...more]
The “Peak Oil” concept — that the world’s petroleum-production rate will soon reach its maximum and commence an inevitable decline, with negative economic consequences — has been around in scientifically articulated form at least since 1998; long enough to see it confirmed in significant ways. [...more]
