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Introduction to Power by Richard Heinberg

December 23, 2021

Introduction to Power by Richard Heinberg

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Richard Heinberg’s latest title, Power is an exploration of humanity’s power over nature and the power of some people over others. Power traces how four key elements developed to give humans extraordinary power: tool making ability, language, social complexity, and the ability to harness energy sources — most significantly, fossil fuels. Today, we take an excerpt from Power that explains how Richard started on the journey of writing this book.

Excerpted from the introduction to Power

Many people are searching for a magic formula to save the world from the converging crises of the 21st century. Climate change, economic inequality, air and water pollution, resource depletion, and the catastrophic disappearance of wildlife threaten to upend society while destabilizing our planet to such a degree that it may be impossible for future generations of humans to persist. What if we could solve all these problems with one simple trick?

Don’t hold your breath. A single solution doesn’t exist: it’s not socialism or capitalism, it’s not renewable energy or nuclear power, it’s not religion or atheism, and it’s not hemp. However, I believe there is a single causative agent in back of most of our troubles, the understanding of which could indeed help us emerge from the hole we’re rapidly digging for ourselves.

That causative agent is power—our pursuit of it, our overuse of it, and our abuse of it. In this book, I argue that all the problems mentioned above, and others as well, are problems of power. We humans are nature’s supreme power addicts. Power—the ability to do something, the ability to get someone else to do something, or the ability to prevent someone else from doing something—is everywhere in the human world…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

A Resilient Society

May 6, 2015

A Resilient Society

The final video in a four-part video series. Released in conjunction with Afterburn: Society Beyond Fossil Fuels.

Resilience is a word that’s gaining a lot of currency in recent years, as more and more people realize there are some shocks headed our way. But what would a more resilient society look like?

This video is the fourth in a four-part series by Richard Heinberg and Post Carbon Institute. The themes covered in these videos are much more thoroughly explored in Heinberg’s latest book, Afterburn: Society Beyond Fossil Fuels. (View the entire series here.)

Special thanks to New Society Publishers for partnering with us on this fantastic series and to Shutterstock.com for granting image rights.

…click on the above link to view the presentation…

 

Olduvai IV: Courage
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Olduvai II: Exodus
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