writeaboutwarming

July 26, 2018 Richard Heinberg, Senior Fellow with the Post Carbon Institute, has written a rebuttal to a recent article by Ted Nordhaus, co-founder of the Breakthrough Institute. Nordhaus's theory of planetary carrying capacity can be summarized as follows: we can engineer our way out of the problem. And he's willing to bet your life and mine that he's right! Nordhaus admits no constraints on human population of the earth, basing his theory on another specious assumption, called decoupling. Since the advent of the Industrial Revolution, Nordhaus, and other economists, maintain that "each increment of economic growth in developed economies has brought lower resource and energy use than the last." Heinberg is quick to point out that an analysis of decoupling thus far is merely the result of an accounting error. In other words, the numbers Nordhaus relies upon are fractions, barely supporting his claims. In order for the developing world to enjoy a standard of l...

CORRECTION:   I failed to mention in my last article that Australia sells and sends a great deal of coal to China every year.   My oversight – sorry! February 24, 2015 – It’s been 43 years since the Club of Rome commissioned scientists at MIT to conduct research into the likelihood of civilization collapse.   Their results were published in a book titled The Limits to Growth .   Its primary focus was the finiteness of our planet, and its inability to support never-ending population growth and resource depletion. Researchers at the University of Melbourne recently decided to examine the accuracy of Limit ’s predictions.   Dr. Graham Turner used data provided by both the United Nations and the United States, specifically the UN’s department of economic and social affairs, Unesco, the UN’s food and agriculture organization, the UN statistical yearbook, and the United States’ National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. What he and his research te...