Pope Francis To Discuss Climate Change With Big Oil

At a time when investors are piling pressure on Big Oil to take climate change seriously, top executives from some of the major global oil companies will be discussing climate change next week at the Vatican with Pope Francis, who called on Catholics in 2015 to join the fight against climate change, Axios reported on […]

Waiting for Korowicz

  The first named storm of the Atlantic Hurricane Season took out our power briefly, and while nothing we experienced can compare to the outage still being suffered in the Caribbean from the last hurricane season, this one, Alberto, was enough to remind us of the Korowicz Crunch. We have a standalone PV system on […]

7 Ways To Stay Alive In A Post-Collapse Society

There have always been times where we inadvertently put ourselves in precarious situations. In this case, your best bet is to trust your gut. If you don’t feel the situation is right, find the nearest exit and leave the area. We covered some of these times in our most recent article regarding attackers and how […]

British Empire: how big was it and why did it collapse?

At its peak, the British Empire was the largest the world has ever seen, and its legacy can still be felt keenly today, for better or worse. The territories it controlled ranged from tiny islands to vast segments of the world’s major continents. As the National Archives writes, the history of the British Empire is […]

Heinberg: Systems Thinking, Critical Thinking, and Personal Resilience

As a writer focused on the global sustainability crisis, I’m often asked how to deal with the stress of knowing—knowing, that is, that we humans have severely overshot Earth’s long-term carrying capacity, making a collapse of both civilization and Earth’s ecological systems likely; knowing that we are depleting Earth’s resources (including fossil fuels and minerals) […]

America 2018: Dicier By The Day

Scrape all this putrid excrescence off and we’re left with a non-fantasy reality: everything is getting dicier by the day. If we look beneath the cheery chatter of the financial media and the tiresomely repetitive Russian collusion narrative (that’s unraveling as the Ministry of Propaganda’s machinations are exposed), we find that America in 2018 is dicier by the […]

The Russians Aren’t Coming

“What exactly is our strategy for the Malthusian predicament?“   In his autobiography, Hollywood director, Norman Jewison describes meeting John Wayne at a party. “Have you met Norman Jewison? The film director?” I looked down the long flight of stairs, shirtless and clutching my pants. John Wayne stared back, swaying slightly and holding a large […]

The Taste of Another’s Thoughts

We’ve taken a somewhat rambling route in our discussion of how each of us can haul ourselves up out of the swamp of abstractions in which modern industrial society is sinking fast, and find our way to the solid ground of things that actually matter. I know some of my readers have been baffled or […]

Five Things You Should Know About Collapse

  The Roman philosopher Lucius Annaeus Seneca was perhaps the first in history to identify and discuss collapse and to note that “the way to ruin is rapid.” From Seneca’s idea, Ugo Bardi coined the term “Seneca Effect” to describe all cases where things go bad fast and used the modern science of complex system […]

Oil Depletion Analysis Centre

Welcome to the ODAC Newsletter, a weekly roundup from the Oil Depletion Analysis Centre, the UK registered charity dedicated to raising awareness of peak oil. Last week began with a brief weakening of the oil price in response to the latest interest rate adjustment by the Fed, this was however extremely short-lived. By mid-week oil […]

Why is your teenage sibling trying to kill you?

In the process of spring cleaning I happened across a cardboard binder with a yellowing, handwritten sticky label reading “An Older View Regarding Inalienable Rights.” Inside was a xerox copy of a 69-page document dated January 9, 1979 from an administrative proceeding before the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (USNRC-SECY-78–560) in the matter of the petition […]

Where are We Going?

By Nate Hagens, Ed. note: Nate Hagens gave this talk on Earth Day on April 23, 2018 at The Land Institute, Salina, Kansas. What follows is an edited transcript of the talk. The Human Predicament Around 11,000 years ago, as the last ice age ended, our ancestors – in no fewer than 5 locations around […]

Kunstler: That Collapse You Ordered…?

I had a fellow on my latest podcast, released Sunday, who insists that the world population will crash 90-plus percent from the current 7.6 billion to 600 million by the end of this century. Jack Alpert heads an outfit called the Stanford Knowledge Integration Lab (SKIL) which he started at Stanford University in 1978 and now runs […]

Jack Albert on Unwinding the Human Predicament

Jack Alpert is director of Stanford Knowledge Integration Lab, a Lab which he started in 1978 at Stanford University. In 1992 the Lab left Stanford and became a non profit research foundation. The research focused on how people gather and process information to understand dynamic systems. Over the years the Lab has transitioned its focus […]

Kunstler: Yakking with Chris Nelder about Energy Transition

Chris Nelder is a Manager in the Mobility practice at the Rocky Mountain Institute in Boulder, Colorado, where he heads the EV-grid Integration team. Chris has written about energy and investing for more than a decade. He is the author two books on energy and investing, as well as more than 200 articles on energy […]

The End of Peak Oil

U.S. production of crude oil is now about ten million barrels per day, matching peak levels achieved in 1970.  The Energy Information Administration projects that U.S. oil production this year will be the highest ever recorded.  Let’s hope this is the final stake in the heart of peak oil theories. As a young geology student in 1981, I was taught that […]

Ten reflections on today’s crisis

Roberto Savio is founder of IPS Inter Press Service and President Emeritus ROME, Apr 10 2018 (IPS) – It is now clearly evident that w e are in a period of transition, even though we remain uncertain as to its outcome. The political, economic and social system that has accompanied us since the end of […]

Richard Heinberg on why low oil prices do not mean there is plenty of oil, EROI, collapse

[ Yet another wise, thoughtful, and wide-ranging essay from my favorite writer of the many facets of a civilization about to decline as it is starved of the fossil fuels that feed it.  Although the topics are quite varied, Heinberg weaves them into a cloth that is more than the sum of the parts in […]

First they locked up the Knowledge

“If you were given the choice between continued life on earth and computerized devices and the internet, which would you choose?”   “Putting food under lock and key was one of the great innovations of your culture. No other culture in history has ever put food under lock and key — and putting it there is the […]

Those Pesky Declinists and Their Dangerous Ideas

https://aeon.co/ideas/why-the-idea-that-the-world-is-in-terminal-decline-is-so-dangerous Declinists claim to see the big picture. Their portraits are grandiose, subsuming, total. Consider one of the all-time bestsellers, the Club of Rome’s The Limits to Growth (1972). With more than 30 million copies sold in 30 languages, this ‘Project on the Predicament of Mankind’ gave alarmed readers a portrait of demise, mapped out with gloomy […]

The Truths We Have In Common

In recent posts here on Ecosophia.net, I’ve sketched out the way that the era of abstraction in which we’ve all grown up has foundered, following patterns that were old before our civilization was born. We’ve talked about the way that the abstract generalizations that started out helping to make sense of on-the-ground realities have been […]

The Twilight of Authority

I wrote a couple of weeks ago about the need for a rhetorical education—that is, an education that doesn’t presume to lay down the law about what’s true and what’s false, but instead teaches each individual how to understand and assess claims about truth and falsehood. That’s a concept many people find challenging these days. […]

Kunstler: Chatting with Tom Whipple of Peak Oil News

Tom Whipple is a former US Intel analyst who has put out the PeakOilNews for more than a decade. His newsletter is now associated with the PostCarbon institute and can be found at Peak-oil.org. Tom is not a tin-foil hat guy, but we get into a discussion in the heart of the interview about exotic […]

Living At The Height Of Civilization — Staring Into The Abyss

  Texas has switched back to Daylight Saving Time and I am once again driving to work in the dark. The stars were still out this morning when I left the house in the canyon and began my 28 mile commute to work, the first 20 miles or so I now achieve under eV power. […]

John Michael Greer: A Rhetorical Education

Quite a bit of the discussion on this blog and its predecessors has focused on controversial issues, the kind of thing that causes rhetoric to fly fast and thick.  Given the themes I like to discuss in these essays, that could hardly have been avoided.  Ours is an age riven by disputes, in which debate […]

How to Thrive When the World’s Falling Apart: A Tiny Seven Step Program for Happiness, Beauty, Truth, and Love

“I see a lot of people telling us the world is crashing and burning but very little advice for little people able to plan for the future. Help!!” I get emails. And sometimes I even write essays about them. So. How is one to survive all this — these tumultuous, anxiety-inducing times? I’m going to take you […]

Kunstler: Resist That

Perhaps because a weary public was underwhelmed by his indictment last week of thirteen ham sandwiches with Russian dressing, Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller has returned to an old baloney sandwich with American cheese named Paul Manafort, and slathered on some extra mayonnaise to lubricate his journey to federal prison. The additional charges specify tax evasion […]

Our only hope for long term survival

Sometimes, a good rant is needed. Here is one by Geoffrey Chia by Geoffrey Chia, February 2018 Language warning: Many may find the following article offensive, such as: Technocornucopians – eg geoengineering and carbon drawdown fantasists, blinkered university academics and engineers, TZM, Elon Musk etc People who think reducing population and/or consumption are sacred cows […]

Richard Heinberg: Old Age and Societal Decline

People grow old and die. Civilizations eventually fail. For centuries amateur philosophers have used the former as a metaphor for the latter, leading to a few useful insights and just as many misleading generalizations. The comparison becomes more immediately interesting as our own civilization stumbles blindly toward collapse. While not the cheeriest of subjects, it’s […]

Prepping for Death

  Once you become fully aware of collapse, it tends to make you a little crazy.  There is nobody I have come across in the collapse blogosphere who isn’t somewhat nuts.  Mind you, this definition of “nuts” is being measured against what is considered normal inside an insane society, so in reality it may not […]

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