Cameron Leckie

Understandably growth, growth and more growth is the mantra of politicians, economists and media commentators the world round. However, what if future growth is just not possible? The recently released World Energy Outlook (WEO) from the International Energy Agency (IEA) did not go so far as to say that future growth is no longer possible, but it does suggest that at the global level future economic growth is now a zero sum game. In short, China and India’s gain is the OECD’s loss.

One reason that we may abandon a technology is that the costs outweigh the benefits. Thus the fridge has been abandoned because the cost of maintaining it outweighs the benefit of keeping lunch cold. Other reasons might be that the technology is no longer supportable (for example, if you cannot access fuel, your car is not going anywhere) or another technology appears/reappears to replace it. In this post, I would like to propose a theory by which some, or potentially many, modern technologies could be abandoned. This is an important issue because of its implications for government policy, business investment and of course society as a whole.

Busting the myth of progress is a precursor to changing industrial civilisations’ current unsustainable path.

Economic recovery! The media, economists and politicians are talking it up. The spin machines are working flat out cherry picking statistics to convince us that recovery is underway and we are entering another growth phase. It could, however, be argued that this is the least likely of all the potential outcomes from the global financial crisis. One of those potential outcomes, one rarely spoken about unless you are Barnaby Joyce, is the subject of this article.

The magnitude of the changes required to adapt to a declining oil supply in Australia imply costs of billions of dollars and time measured in decades.

Submissions to the Australian Government’s National Aviation Policy (NAP) Green paper have just closed. Unfortunately, but not surprisingly, there is no mention of peak oil nor its impacts in the Green Paper.