The miniaturization of death: How technology has tipped the balance away from state power
Violence is coming in smaller and smaller packages these days.
Kurt Cobb
Graphite: A new energy economy resource is suddenly harder to get
More and more countries are becoming stingy about what natural resources they will ship abroad. That has implications for new energy economy products and industries.
We’re poisoning teenagers (but it doesn’t seem to matter)
What happens when guilt gets spread around so thin that no one feels responsible.
An elegy in prose for Michael Dowd
Michael Dowd’s spirit left his body, in the wee hours of Saturday, October 7, pulling out the roots of him from thousands, tens of thousands, of people – me included.
The clean energy economy turns out to be the metals energy economy
The fossil fuel era led to widespread dependence on greenhouse gas producing nonrenewable energy sources. The emerging clean energy era is leading to widespread dependence on vast new supplies of nonrenewable metals
Pincushion America revisited: The legacy of fracking on our drinking water
The toxic legacy of fracking is now making itself visible in our drinking water. Expect many more stories of contamination in the coming years.
Climate change and the hidden water cost of the Panama Canal
The critical importance of water transportation is coming into focus as lack of water cripples river and canal navigation.
How to poison the world (and get away with it)
The world’s regulators are running way behind in trying to evaluate and regulate the toxic chemicals in our environment. That’s a feature, not a bug in our regulatory systems
George Monbiot on factory farming: a Simpler Way critique
George has a long and heroic record of fighting for the environment. His latest campaign is to reduce the huge burden that farming inflicts on global ecosystems, by shifting much food production to high-tech “factory farming”. But he fails to see The Simpler Way solution.
‘White’ hydrogen: The hydrogen economy zombie rises again
The fantasy that the world economy is going to switch seamlessly to hydrogen energy keeps recurring. The latest iteration is ‘white hydrogen.’
Thinking about a world of scarcity
As scarcity increasingly becomes an issue for many key resources, the call for government intervention is rising. That’s because the marketplace is failing in the face of scarcity brought on by geological limits and climate change.
Why I assume “fixes” meant to prevent collapse won’t work
The airwaves and internet are filled with “solutions” each day to the myriad interlocking environmental and resource limits humanity faces. A very tiny number call for extraordinary reductions in consumption. The rest aren’t solutions at all.