More than 80 percent of the world’s energy now comes from fossil fuels, and every bit of it is mined from the earth.
Hubbert’s views echoed those in The Road to Survival, published the year before, except that he thought in terms of physical limits, rather than biological limits. Still, he ended up in the same place...
Hubbert, one of the nation’s most important petroleum scientists, built much of the intellectual framework for the environmental movement. He was a Wizard who became a Prophet.
Hubbert laid this out in the Technocracy Study Course: Should the fruit flies continue to multiply at their initial compound interest rate, it can be shown by computation that in a relatively few week...
How could these hierarchical, acquisitive, market-oriented, monotheistic, ethnocentric newcomers have absorbed ideas and customs from the egalitarian, reciprocal, noncapitalistic, pantheistic, ethnoce...
Governor Bradford is said to have attributed the plague to the good hand of God, which favored our beginnings by sweeping away great multitudes of the natives … that he might make room for us.
For a geophysicist, what’s going on is stunning, my friend told me. We used to believe these systems needed thousands of years to make these shifts. Instead it’s happening so fast that it’s terrifying...
Far too often, we have been told that the future will be wracked by crises of energy scarcity, when the problems our children will face will be due to its abundance.
Evolution has provided the human brain with marvelous tools for detecting and resolving fast-moving, clearly visible, small-scale, near-future risks. By the same token, the brain is easily overwhelmed...
Einstein received the Nobel Prize in 1921 for explaining the photoelectric effect. But Fritts’s invention remained a laboratory curiosity.
Could the doomsayers have been correct, but rung the alarm a little too early? After all, Earth is finite, so the amount of energy it contains must also be finite. Isn’t it wholly rational to expect f...
Chestnut was especially popular—not the imported European chestnut roasted on Manhattan street corners in the fall, but the smaller, soft-shelled, deeply sweet native American chestnut, now almost ext...
By the eve of the American Revolution, a third of the native people in Rhode Island were enslaved. Indian bondage was more common still in the southern colonies.
At the same time, Wari and Tiwanaku kept themselves separate. Although they shared resources, there is little evidence that people from one culture visited the other often, or had friendships across t...
About 3.5 percent of the weight of seawater consists of dissolved salts, most of it table salt. The most common way of removing the salt is known as reverse osmosis.
Many of the racial alarmists were also leaders in the nation’s new conservation movement. The blue-blooded toffs who feared that the noble and superior white race was menaced by unwashed rabble also s...
[T]he Indian deaths were such a severe financial blow to the colonies that...[t]o resupply themselves with labor, the Spaniards began importing slaves from Africa.
Wizard-style renewable advocates like the venture-capital-backed firm that built Crescent Dunes scoff at these ideas. Even in the best of circumstances, the process of replacing the present coal-and-g...
What happened in 1518 and 1519 is not. In those years, according to Bartolomé de Las Casas, a missionary priest who lived through the incident, Spanish orange, pomegranate, and cassia plantations were...
Weaver never published his ideas. His memorandum lay unnoticed in the archives of the foundation, now stored underground on one of the Rockefeller estates. And his dream of reworking photosynthesis wo...