Richard Heinberg

Whenever there's an energy crisis, it can quickly become an everything crisis.

It's difficult to convey the degree and depth of elites' failure without descending into lurid disaster porn.

As the people of Ukraine suffer—world leaders, transfixed by geopolitics—seem even further away from collective recognition of what will be required to avert societal collapse.

The essence of the plan is simplicity itself: just directly reduce fossil fuel production and consumption.

It's certainly too little, and it’s too late to avert significant impacts to nature and humanity. But it’s not too late to wise up to natural limits and start planning for low-energy life after fossil fuels. If we adopt a cynical attitude and do nothing, we guarantee the worst possible outcome for future generations.

As with climate change, inequality, and our other collective problems, solutions will entail confronting and reining in power—whether the power of wealth, of outsized political representation, or of social media companies.

In order to recover the abundance of these fuels that the EIA claims will be there for the taking, between now and 2050 the industry will need to drill something on the order of 700,000 new wells at a total cost of over $5 trillion.

Leaders of government, finance, and industry seem to have borrowed their way to another decade of economic growth—which was mostly squandered in profit-taking rather than being spent preparing for the societal challenges that the inevitable and fast-approaching termination of growth will entail.