Enlightenment Now by Steven Pinker — don’t believe the false doom-mongers

Towards the end of this passionate book in praise of Enlightenment values the author sounds a defiant but plaintive note. “Persuasion by facts and logic, the most direct strategy,” Steven Pinker writes, “is not always futile.” You can almost hear the “despites” in his mind. Despite the widespread belief among fashionable intellectuals that emotions and […]

Kunstler: Yet Another Year of Magical Thinking

A peculiar feature of the human condition is that a society in distress will call forth intellectual witch-doctors to put on a colorful show that distracts the supposedly thinking class from the insoluble quandaries that portend serious trouble ahead. This feature is on display these days in the person of freelance space pioneer Elon Musk. […]

Transition US: A Year in Review

Transition US has published its annual review, highlighting our accomplishments and detailing our metrics from the 2017 calendar year. Enjoy!   Letter from the Transition US Team We’ve just completed our ninth year at Transition US, and during this time we’ve seen historic swings across the political spectrum, economic peaks and crashes, and the most […]

The Bumpy Road Down, Part 4: Trends in Collapse

Bamboo in Winter This time I’m going to look at some of the changes that will happen along the bumpy road down and the forces and trends that will lead to them. If you followed what I was saying in my last post, you’ll have realized that the bumpy road will be a matter of […]

Post Carbon Sustainability Town Hall – Corvallis

12 March, 2018 7:00 pm CH2MHill Alumni Center, Corvallis, OR Sustainability Town Hall 2018, Corvallis Asher Miller Registration is now open for the 2018 Sustainability Town Hall, to be held on Monday, March 12, from 7 to 9 pm at the CH2MHill Alumni Center on the OSU campus. Save your place by registering HERE. Participants will be […]

The Bumpy Road Down, Part 3

In the last post in this series I talked about the next financial crash and how it may well be serious enough to spread into the non-financial sectors of the economy and effect supply chains and critical systems in ways that we did not see in the Global Financial Crisis of 2007-08. Systems that most […]

Would Rural Areas Be Safer In A SHTF Situation?

In a situation where national infrastructure and life sustaining resources are suddenly cut off , population density will have a lot to do with how well you get by in the days following the crisis. When it happens, what you have on hand will likely be all you have to work with for an extended […]

The Rise of the Asian Consumer

There are five Starbucks coffee shops within an easy, 10-minute walk from my apartment in the central business district of China’s capital city. That may come as a surprise. But Starbucks has become as much a part of daily life in China’s major metropolises as it has in America. Starbucks already has more than 3,000 […]

Richard Heinberg: Post Carbon Music

On November 30, 2017 at the New England Conservatory of Music, Richard performed Paganini’s “Sonata Concertata For Guitar And Violin” and spoke about what the future might mean for today’s young musicians and artists, and the important role they have to play in the societal transformation ahead.  Full transcript: Over the next few minutes I hope to […]

Extinction Anxiety

(Address for “Psyche and the Spirit of the Times: Psychoanalyzing Trumpism” given at Antioch University Seattle.)   In order to talk about extinction anxiety I first need to address epistemological anxiety, otherwise, you won’t know if what I am saying to you is a bunch of ‘fake news’ served up by yet another privileged white […]

Consumerism’s Dirty Little Secret: Are We Buying All the Wrong Things?

I have some terrible news… You’re stranded in the desert! For three days, you’ve traveled in the heat without food or water. Your eyelids are heavy and your legs even heavier. Your lips are cracked, too dry now to even bleed. For miles and miles, all you see is sky, rock and sand. Your foot […]

Prepare For The Imminent Economic Collapse 2018

Will the US Economic Collapse Happen in 2018? The economic forecast for 2018 is more than bleak, and there is more than enough economic data out there to show there could be an economic collapse and stock market crash in 2018.

Tom Whipple: Peak Oil Review – 15 January 2018

Quote of the Week “Just like Florida, our states are unique with vibrant coastal economies. Providing all of our states with the same exemption from dangerous offshore oil and gas drilling would ensure that vital industries from tourism to recreation to fishing are not needlessly placed in harm’s way.” Letter from 22 Democratic US senators […]

The Seneca Effect: a Book Review by Jantje Hannover

This is a review of the German edition of “The Seneca Effect” written by Jantie Hannover for the site of the radio station “Deutschelandfunk.” Very well done by someone who really read the book. Here I report a translation made mainly using “Google Translate,” and also some intervention on my part. Not a very good […]

How the Collapse of Venezuela Really Happened

Today we welcome back our friend Jose, who wrote the awesome article about Christmas in Venezuela. It was so well-received that I invited him back to do a recurring series. In this piece, he begins telling us the story about how his country started the slide into a slow-motion collapse. Jose is a heck of […]

Keeping Fossil Fuels Underground Makes No Sense

What would happen if climateers succeed in their campaign to keep fossil fuels in the ground? The experience of Walt Disney World in Orlando more than 40 years ago provides some answers. In 1973, two years after it opened, plans to expand Disney World beyond the original theme park were jeopardized when war broke out […]

A Dangerous Year

‘Tis the season for making predictions about the events lurking in wait for us all in the upcoming year, and I see no reason to demur from that common if risky habit. Those of my readers who’ve been following my blog since the days of The Archdruid Report know that my method in making these […]

7 Huge News Stories You Probably Didn’t Hear About In 2017

2017 was a chaotic year filled with violent protest, threats of nuclear war, ongoing Cold War-style accusations of collusion with ‘the Russians,’ and widespread allegations of sexual harassment.   Establishment media outlets like Washington Post and CNN took it upon themselves to protect American democracy from the Trump administration, but in typical fashion, many of the most vital stories […]

An Open letter to the School of Public Health, UQ, re: the looming net energy cliff

Open Letter To: Staff of the School of Public Health, University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia, August 2017 From: Dr Geoffrey Chia, MBBS, MRCP, FRACP Re: The looming Net Energy Cliff, Global Economic/Industrial collapse and Human Die-off “infinite consumption from a finite resource base is impossible” Dear Colleagues, I am a Cardiologist who convened the group […]

John Michael Greer: Systems That Suck Less

Last week’s post on political economy attracted plenty of disagreement. Now of course this came as no surprise, and it was also not exactly surprising that most of the disagreement took the shape of strident claims that I’d used the wrong definition of socialism. That’s actually worth addressing here, because it will help clear the […]

Kunstler: Christmas Story

These are the long, dark hours when cis-hetero white patriarchs sit by the hearth chewing over their regrets for the fading year and expectations for the year waiting to be born. I confess, I like Christmas a lot, Hebrew that I am, perhaps the musical and sensual trappings more than the virgin birth business. Something […]

Kunstler: 2017 Year in Review

2017 was the kind of year when no amount of showers could wash off the feeling of existential yeccchhhhh that crept over you day after day like jungle rot. You needed to go through the carwash without your car… or maybe an acid bath would get the stink off. Cinematically, if 2016 was like The […]

Limits to Economic Growth

These are notes from a short lecture given at Nottingham University on 28th November 2017. 1 Production Increase During the 17th and 18th centuries the rise of mercantile power, colonialism and a slave economy was associated with the development of the idea that “improvement” meant production growth and was an indicator of a new idea […]

Collapse Step by Step, Part 8 — The Bumpy Road Down

The Bumpy Road Down, Part 1 The term “bumpy road down” refers to the cyclic pattern of crash and partial recovery that I believe will characterize the rest of the age of scarcity and make for a slow step by step collapse, rather than a single hard and fast crash. Indeed, that is where the […]

Michael Lynch: How To Read Conflicting Energy Headlines

The Internet is to public discourse what pamphleteering was in the 18th century:  an outlet for opinions that require minimal input.  Using a search engine allows a pundit to find support for almost any opinion, which is very useful if you’re trying to win an argument as opposed to get to the truth.  In this […]

A Few Notes on Nature Spirits, Part Two: Into A Living World

Last week’s post here on Ecosophia.net dealt with some of the reasons why so many people in today’s industrial societies are acutely uncomfortable with the suggestion that the forces and processes of nature might be persons rather than things. That’s what we’re discussing, after all, when we talk about nature spirits. The world of spirits, […]

Is The EIA Overestimating The U.S. Shale Boom?

The American shale boom may be overstated by the U.S. Energy Department, according to a new MIT study that suggests the agency may be over-attributing a rise in shale drilling to technological advances. “The EIA is assuming that productivity of individual wells will continue to rise as a result of improvements in technology,” MIT researcher […]

Peakoil.com Server Down Nov 29

Hi Everyone – Our hosting service was attacked and wiped out ; so peakoil.com website was restored from our last offsite backup taken Sunday Nov 26. Posts made over the last couple of days have been lost, but everything else is restored.    

The Economic End Game Continues

In November of 2014 I published an article titled ‘The Economic End Game Explained’. In it I outlined what I believed would be the process by which globalists would achieve what they call the “new world order” or what they sometimes call the “global economic reset.” As I have shown in great detail in the […]

Prince William warns that there are too many people in the world

Rapidly growing human populations risk having a “terrible impact” on the world, the Duke of Cambridge has warned. The Duke said that as a result, wildlife was being put under “enormous pressure” and called for the issue to be addressed with renewed vigour. His concerns echo those of his grandfather, the Duke of Edinburgh, who […]

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