California shows why ‘climate chaos’ describes the climate problem better
California faces extreme rainfall and serious drought at the same time. That’s chaos.
Kurt Cobb
The uncertain future of industrial process heat: A mirror for our energy challenges
Almost everything we use is at some point processed using heat. Where that heat will come from in the future poses problems in a world depleting its fossil fuels and focusing on addressing climate change.
Can our current global system coexist with pandemics?
The COVID pandemic hasn’t ended. We’ve become tired of it and moved on. But nature doesn’t move on just because we do and I’ve been wondering about whether we are in denial because the global system we’ve built simply isn’t compatible with pandemics.
I have seen the future and it is ‘Ramp Hollow’
Harrison Brown wrote in 1954 that the most likely outcome of industrial civilization is a return to agrarian civilization. Historian Steven Stoll gives us a glimpse of an agrarian world that existed before the industrial revolution, one that might provide a possible pattern for an agrarian existence in the future.
With U.S. shale oil boom over, can world production climb?
World growth in oil supplies will have to come from someplace other than the United States. Will there be a new oil production savior?
What not to do your first week as a beekeeper
I’m not an expert beekeeper; My cousin in County Longford is an expert beekeeper, and I’ve learned a lot from him. I’m a guy who had a beehive, and got some honey once a year. I’m just writing about what it was like to get the hive, so you can avoid some of the same mistakes.
Path to extinction? Sperm count accelerates its decline
Humans could disappear from planet Earth without even a whimper, that is, the whimper of new babies as the human sperm count keeps plummeting.
What I learned from steady-state economist Herman Daly
Steady-state economist Herman Daly died in October. His work created a small corner of sanity in an otherwise insane discipline.
Life (sort of) imitates art: Russian provocations in Norway
The 2015 Norwegian television series “Occupied” has what will strike viewers today as an upside down premise. In the fictional series Russia invades Norway on behalf of the European Union to restore oil and gas production shut down by Norway’s new environmentally conscious government.
East vs West, ‘Stuff’ vs ‘Finance’
As a military conflict rages in Ukraine between Russia and what the Russian government calls “the West” (apparently meaning NATO allies and particularly the United States), there is a parallel economic battle between “stuff” and “finance.” Both categories are affected by economic sanction regimes imposed by each side. But there is a striking difference in what each side has to sell.
Settling on enough
To a poor man, more is better, and all humans throughout history were poor compared to the wealth we enjoy. Now that we have lived in the fossil-fuel window for longer than anyone can remember, we live in comfort our ancestors could not have imagined, yet we keep pursuing more.
Bruno Latour: A philosopher for our perilous times
French philosopher Bruno Latour died earlier this month at age 75. Of the many insights I absorbed from his work I mention four here:
1. Nature and culture are not two things; they are one.
2. Facts require champions
3. Nature sits in the middle of our politics.
4. There are no “objects” just networks.