On December 8, President Joe Biden signed an executive order to spearhead his administration’s efforts to combat climate change. What does this order actually promise to accomplish? How does that compare with what other nations are doing? Is any...
Amongst many other lessons from this past year for us at Post Carbon Institute is the reminder to stay humble. We have long warned humanity (anyone who would listen) that we were on an unsustainable, ruinous path that no...
A note from Richard Heinberg to our Post Carbon Institute readers: Thanks to a generous grant from Mobius Foundation, all donations made through the end of the year will be matched! Every donor will also get an exclusive link...
Coal and natural gas spot prices have recently soared to record levels internationally, while oil is trading at over $80 a barrel—the highest price in seven years. Newspaper columnists are asking whether people in Europe and Asia who can’t...
These disclosures about the how the world’s wealthy and powerful hide their vast fortunes will hopefully turn up the heat on the politicians that maintain the wealth-hiding status quo. This week we are closely watching the disclosures emerge from the Pandora...
This essay is based on, and partly extracted from, the book POWER: LIMITS AND PROSPECTS FOR HUMAN SURVIVAL. During the last century, evolutionary biologists developed the idea that power (defined as the rate of energy transfer) is key to...
This article is adapted from POWER: Limits and Prospects for Human Survival (New Society Publishers) by Richard Heinberg Climate change is often incorrectly described as an isolated pollution issue. In this flawed framing, humanity has simply made a mistake...
Callum Alexander from Scotland recently contacted me with a few queries about renewable energy. I thought they were interesting questions that might occur to others, so I asked his permission to publish our dialog. Callum: If you replace a...
Over the last 16 months, since the formal beginning of the pandemic lockdown, the combined wealth of 713 U.S. billionaires has surged by $1.8 trillion, a gain of almost 60 percent. The total combined wealth of U.S. billionaires increased...
A little over a year ago I wrote an essay titled The United States: An Obituary. It was the tail end of the Trump regime and the early days of the novel coronavirus pandemic; dread was in the air, and I...