Making America ungovernable
Adaptation will require leadership and social cohesion. Instead, America may be lurching toward further political division and violence.
Richard Heinberg
Is Denmark about to export a more dangerous form of COVID-19?
Unfortunately for the minks and the mink industry, the Danish government has now pledged to kill every mink in Denmark is order to eradicate a mutant strain of COVID-19 carried by mink that is transmissible to humans.
Ransomware attacks and biodiversity: A possible lesson from nature
Every student of biology—which naturally includes doctors and health care workers—ought to be aware of the advantages of biodiversity in natural systems.
The cost and consequence of driving
This weekend, Keir Starmer (the leader of UK’s Labour Party) made a decision that million of other British people make every day. He probably didn’t even think twice about it. But that decision had consequences — for his neighbourhood, for the air, for the climate and for one stranger who, because of this decision, would end their weekend in the hospital.
Do you own your own face?
If we don’t own our own faces, then others can use them for whatever purposes they choose, not just governments or businesses, but also private individuals. The destiny of so-called surveillance capitalism is to put everyone’s face and thus identity up for sale in ways that subject people to increasing manipulation and even physical danger.
A simple way to understand what’s happening … and what to do
The world seems to be coming apart at the seams. It’s critical to understand why, so that we can avoid the worst and find the best responses so as to move toward the environmentally and socially healthy future we want. It turns out that there’s a relatively simple frame for gaining such understanding.
Risky business: Cellphone satellite networks endanger asteroid early warning, threaten catastrophic space junk
During the coming decade companies that include Amazon, SpaceX and OneWeb are seeking to launch well over 100,000 satellites to service wireless networks on Earth. Many more satellites may follow after that. The wonders of wireless communications blinded us to the risks of filling the sky with so many satellites.
Has oil peaked?
Last month, the world’s 4th largest oil company—BP—predicted that the world will never again consume as much petroleum as it did last year. So, have we finally hit peak oil? And if so, what does that mean for our economy and our world?
Scavenger or thief: The line will continue to blur
The role of scavenger in nature is to find that which others have discarded or which no longer has life. In the human world, the more desperate the times, the more scavenging people are likely to do and the less stuff there will be to go around. That’s when scavenging may cross the line into theft.
Why am I feeling so anxious? The end of modernism arrives
Underneath all the disorder we see in our pandemic-plagued economic, social and political lives is the crumbling of key assumptions about what we call modernity, a period of “enlightenment” that has supposedly freed us from the past.
The ‘new normal’ has been postponed (and probably canceled)
There remains a hope that once we get past the economic and social effects of the pandemic, all of us will be able to return to something resembling normal life before the pandemic—even if it is a “new normal” marked by heightened vigilance and protection against infectious disease … But the date for this recovery to a new normal seems to keep getting postponed.
Can changing habits for self-reliance and resilience help society avoid the worst of unfortunate futures?
Retrosuburbia provides the patterns and models that need to be replicated across our residential heartlands to achieve a scale of impact.