Your browser does not support the audio tag. Download: PDF | EPUB | MP3 | WATCH VIDEO When it comes to the exploitation of non-renewable resources, what’s up for debate is not if the rate of harvest will peak and decline, but when this peak will occur. Here, some recent history seems relevant. Back in the mid 2000s, peak-oil theorists stridently predicted that world oil production would soon peak.

Your browser does not support the audio tag. Download: PDF | EPUB | MP3 | WATCH VIDEO There is a tendency, among both scientists and non-scientists, to assume that our current scientific theories are correct in some fundamental sense … but the history of science suggests otherwise.

Your browser does not support the audio tag. Download: PDF | EPUB | MP3 | WATCH VIDEO According to a simple linear trend, losses per disaster are down by about 80% since 1980, as a proportion of GDP. — Roger Pielke Jr. In the world of scientific disinformation, Roger Pielke Jr. is a well known player.

Your browser does not support the audio tag. Download: PDF | EPUB | MP3 | WATCH VIDEO All models are wrong; the practical question is how wrong do they have to be to not be useful. — George Box In science, there’s an inherent trade off between comprehensibility and realism. Realistic models tend to be intricate … even convoluted. But to be comprehensible, a model must be simple.

Your browser does not support the audio tag. Download: PDF | EPUB | MP3 | WATCH VIDEO What had come to an end was not history itself, but an empire, whose time had run out. — Karl Schlögel in The Soviet Century In my last post, ‘The Half Life of Empire’, I charted the rise and fall of the British and US empires, as measured by their share of world energy use.

Your browser does not support the audio tag. Download: PDF | EPUB | MP3 | WATCH VIDEO Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please. — Karl Marx, 1852 A good way to think about human history is that it has two distinct scales. On the small scale we have the churn of daily events — the stuff of endless individual exploits.

Your browser does not support the audio tag. Download: PDF | EPUB | MP3 | WATCH VIDEO To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle. — George Orwell For decades, the word ‘fascist’ existed solely as a hyperbole — a term meant to insult rather than describe. But lately, politics have grown so hyperbolic that the label looks increasingly sincere.

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Your browser does not support the audio tag. Download: PDF | EPUB | MP3 | WATCH VIDEO The U.S. has a shortage of 7.3 million rental homes affordable and available to renters with extremely low incomes. — National Low Income Housing Coalition If mainstream economics teaches us one lesson, it’s that when something becomes unaffordable, it’s because of a shortage. And that brings me to the US housing crisis.

Your browser does not support the audio tag. Download: PDF | EPUB | MP3 | WATCH VIDEO Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. — John Maynard Keynes, 1936 When it comes to rising house prices, nearly everyone has a theory about the cause.

Your browser does not support the audio tag. Download: PDF | EPUB | MP3 | WATCH VIDEO [R]esource productivity can — and should — grow fourfold. … Thus we can live twice as well — yet use half as much. — Factor Four , 1997 When it comes to our sustainability problems, striving for greater resource efficiency seems like an obvious solution.