Richard Heinberg
Resilience.org
California, United States
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Past articles by Richard:
Converging Debt Crises
The world’s vast increase in financial debt over the past few decades ultimately can be resolved only by a round of defaults, or by a deliberate process of debt forgiveness and deleveraging, like the debt jubilees that ancient societies held on a regular basis. → Read More
A realistic ‘energy transition’ is to get better at using less of it
My aim is not to discourage people working toward an energy transition, but to insist that we develop a realistic plan for energy descent, rather than insisting on foolish dreams of eternal consumer abundance by means other than fossil fuels. → Read More
The Power Podcast: Episode 9 How to Navigate Power with Wisdom
In both the book POWER, and in the podcast, I say that my purpose in writing is to explore the historical process that got us to our current existential global crisis, and to help us all develop wisdom and perspective in this daunting historical moment. → Read More
Colin Campbell Remembrance
Colin Campbell, the petroleum geologist who coined the term “peak oil,” has died. He was a co-founder of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil (ASPO) in 2000 and the author of many articles and books on petroleum geology and oil depletion. → Read More
The Final Doubling
It is better to anticipate the final doubling too soon rather than too late, because it will take time to shift expectations away from continuous growth. → Read More
The Power Podcast: Episode 7 Optimal Power
The optimum power principle can be defined as the tendency of natural and human systems to sacrifice some measure of power in the present, so as to maximize power over a longer period of time. → Read More
The Power Podcast: Episode 5 Fossil Fuels Changed Everything
Over the 19th and 20th centuries physical power, social power, and economies grew explosively. The main cause was humanity’s exploitation of fossil fuels. → Read More
Oil, war and the fate of industrial societies
The world teeters on the brink of economic disaster due to energy shortages caused by war. The main oil-producing nations are unable and unwilling to increase output, even though prices are high and threatening to go much higher. The solutions being proposed—electric cars and renewable energy technologies—are coming on line, but not fast enough. Sound familiar? → Read More
Is the Energy Transition Taking Off—or Hitting a Wall?
Does this political achievement mean that the energy transition, in the U.S. if not the world as a whole, is finally on track to achieving the goal of net zero emissions by 2050?If only it were so. → Read More
The Power Podcast: Episode 3 Fire, Tools, and Language
As people learned to wield fire, deploy an array of tools, and coordinate actions through increasingly descriptive language, they became more capable of concentrating power. → Read More
What you need to know about the energy crisis
Prices by themselves are not helpful in understanding why the energy crisis has emerged and how it is likely to develop. Richard Heinberg gives an overview that emphasizes systemic causal connections and feedbacks → Read More
The Power Podcast Episode 1: Introduction to Power
And so it's important to be able to see when there's too much power in a system, and then to know what to do about it. → Read More
Power: Chapter 7. The Fate of the Superorganism
A mature global Superorganism governed by the optimum power principle is for now a purely theoretical entity. → Read More
Power: Chapter 6. Involuntary Power Limits: Death, Extinction, Collapse
If we are indeed in an overshoot phase, we must do what we can to avert or minimize a die-off event. → Read More
Power: Chapter 5. Overpowered: The Fine Mess We’ve Gotten Ourselves Into
Power is essential; without it, we would be literally powerless. But one can have too much of a good thing. → Read More
The 1970s Again?
Are the 2020s just like the 1970s? If our problems now were on the same scale as then, we would have a better chance of solving them → Read More
The supply chain crisis: Transitory or systemic?
Five decades should have been enough for us to find the path to prosperity without growth. Apparently, we didn’t take the lesson to heart. → Read More
Power: Chapter 3. Power in the Holocene
Metaphorically speaking, power is a psychosocial drug, analogous in some ways to cocaine or methamphetamine. → Read More
The Limits to Growth at 50: From Scenarios to Unfolding Reality
The Limits to Growth sold 12 million copies, was translated into 37 languages, and remains the top-selling environmental book ever published. → Read More
The End of Growth: ten years after
Around the year 2010, it appeared to me that signs of growth’s slowing and approaching reversal were accumulating to the point that a new book on the subject might be timely and helpful. "The End of Growth" was published in 2011, and attracted healthy sales but few reviews. Today, indications of impending economic stagnation and retrenchment are arguably stronger still. I thought it might be… → Read More