Richard Heinberg
Richard Heinberg is a senior fellow at the Post Carbon Institute and the author of thirteen books, including his most recent: "Our Renewable Future: Laying the Path for One Hundred Percent Clean Energy" (2016). Previous books include: "Afterburn: Society Beyond Fossil Fuels" (2015), "Snake Oil: How Fracking's False Promise of Plenty Imperils Our Future" (2013); "The Party’s Over: Oil, War, and the Fate of Industrial Societies" (2005); "Peak Everything: Waking Up to the Century of Declines" (2010); and "The End of Growth: Adapting to Our New Economic Reality" (2011).
Articles by this author
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Views Tuesday, February 23, 2016 100% Renewable Energy: What We Can Do in 10 Years If our transition to renewable energy is successful, we will achieve savings in the ongoing energy expenditures needed for economic production. We will be rewarded with a quality of life that is acceptable—and, perhaps, preferable to our current one (even though, for most Americans, material... Read more |
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Views Thursday, February 04, 2016 Carbon Tax: The Low Oil Price Opportunity Carbon taxes constitute a widely discussed policy tool for reducing greenhouse gas emissions and slowing humanity’s headlong rush toward catastrophic climate change. Taxing energy from fossil fuels makes that energy more expensive, thereby making renewable energy comparatively cheaper. There are... Read more |
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Views Wednesday, December 09, 2015 Can We Have Our Climate and Eat It, Too? As much as world leaders would like to focus attention on their economies, terrorism, or winning the next election, the heat is rising. Each new release of data on melting glaciers and extreme weather seems more dire than the last, and each governmental COP meeting organized to come up with an... Read more |
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Views Wednesday, November 18, 2015 Can We Afford the Future? As a child of the 1950s I grew up immersed in a near-universal expectation of progress. Everybody expected a shiny new future; the only thing that might have prevented us from having it was nuclear war, and thankfully that hasn’t happened (so far). But, in the intervening decades, progress has... Read more |
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Views Wednesday, September 09, 2015 Cap Fossil Fuel Production Now! Climate scientists are in broad agreement that there are enough fossil fuels in the Earth’s crust that, if they were all burned, the result would be dramatically rising sea levels, extreme weather, plummeting food production, dying seas, and a mass extinction of species (possibly including our own... Read more |
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Views Sunday, June 07, 2015 Renewable Energy Will Not Support Economic Growth The world needs to end its dependence on fossil fuels as quickly as possible. That’s the only sane response to climate change, and to the economic dilemma of declining oil, coal, and gas resource quality and increasing extraction costs. The nuclear industry is on life support in most countries, so... Read more |
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Views Tuesday, April 14, 2015 Fight of the Century: Localization in a Globalized World CD editor's note : The following is an excerpt from Richard Heinberg's latest book, Afterburn: Society Beyond Fossil Fuels (New Society/April 2015), which appears at Common Dreams with the kind permission of the author and publisher. As the world economy crashes against debt and resource limits,... Read more |
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Views Tuesday, April 07, 2015 The Great Burning: On Rising to the Greatest Challenge Humanity Has Ever Faced CD editor's note : The following is an excerpt from Richard Heinberg's latest book, Afterburn: Society Beyond Fossil Fuels (New Society/April 2015), which appears at Common Dreams with the kind permission of the author and publisher. We live in a time of what might be called The Great Burning... Read more |
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Views Saturday, March 14, 2015 Only Less Will Do When I’m not writing books or essays on environmental issues, or sleeping or eating, you’re likely to find me playing the violin. This has been an obsessive activity for me since I was a boy, and seems to deliver ever more satisfaction as time passes. Making and operating the little wooden box that... Read more |
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Views Sunday, February 08, 2015 After the Peak Nearly 17 years ago the modern peak oil movement began with the publication of “ The End of Cheap Oil ” by petroleum geologists Colin Campbell and Jean Laherrère in the March, 1998 issue of Scientific American. Campbell coined the term “peak oil” to describe the inevitable moment when the world... Read more |