Articles

Richard Heinberg muses on the passing of the days of cheap air travel: The airline industry has no future. The same is true for airfreight. No air carrier has a viable plan to make a profit with oil at current prices—much less in years to come as the petroleum available to world markets dwindles rapidly.

As U.S. gasoline prices crest the astronomical price of four dollars a gallon, many Americans are complaining that prices are too high to bear. They might spare a thought for the Scottish who would be grateful to pay $8.30 a gallon, if only they could get it.

In this article for HopeDance Magazine, Post Carbon Institute founder Julian Darley
discusses the connections between food and energy, both globally and as locally as your kitchen table.

In this month's MuseLetter, Heinberg shares some material from his upcoming book on coal. Also included are his May column for The Ecologist magazine ("What Car do You Drive?"), a Foreword that he wrote for the new edition of Mat Stein’s brilliant book When Technology Fails, and a brief blog for the Post Carbon Institute website.

The following is a proposal to help make communities better able to respond to the coming economic shocks from resource depletion, beginning with Peak Oil, and perhaps also to shocks from other causes (such as the ongoing subprime mortgage and credit collapse). Making existing petroleum-reliant communities truly sustainable is a huge task. Virtually every system must be redesigned—from transport to food, sanitation, health care, and manufacturing.

This MuseLetter, and several more during the next few months, will be chapters for a forthcoming book on coal, to be published by Post Carbon Press. This month's issue is the book's Introduction. The world appears poised for a headlong sprint toward greater dependence on coal. This book's purpose is to examine one crucial question that will shape this next great coal rush: How much is left?

A transcript of Peak Moment's feature on Post Carbon Cities is now available thanks to volunteer Brian Magee. Transcriptions and translations of our content help spread GPM's important message to an even wider audience - to become a volunteer transcriber or translator for Global Public Media, please read the information page, then contact us. Thanks for your support!

It's becoming increasingly clear that 2008 will be a catastrophic year for the US economy, and therefore probably for that of the world as a whole. The reasons boil down to two: continuing and snowballing fallout from the subprime mortgage fiasco (exacerbated by an orgy of debt-leveraging), and record-high, continuously advancing oil prices. This brief portion of the February Museletter is so topical it bears immediate posting.

A transcript of Richard Heinberg on the Reality Report and a transcript of Jay Martin discussing community supported agriculture are now available thanks to volunteer transcriber Brian Magee. Transcriptions and translations of our content help spread GPM's important message to an even wider audience - to become a volunteer transcriber or translator for Global Public Media, please read the information page, then contact us. Thanks for your support!

In early November, 2007, the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) announced the United States had achieved a third quarter Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of 3.9 percent. That number was later updated to 4.9 percent. Those numbers set off my “reasonable test” alarm. How, I wondered, with an accelerating rate of inflation and declining economic activity, could the United States turn in such a stellar performance? The BEA’s report flunked the reasonable test.