Articles by JMG

Our culture of overcompensation

Mark Morford:

Bottom line: You can hope for the big shifts. You can hope for some sort of grand awakening, some sort of removal of the tumor and a relief from the pain of excess waste and abuse and happy ignorance.

But, of course, what you get instead is, well, a nice drive to the megamall in a shiny 2008 Escalade for a couple of aspirin and some compact fluorescent lightbulbs and a copy of "An Inconvenient Truth" on DVD. Ain't that America.

More excerpts beneath the fold.

Once we blow through the carbon sinks, it’s down the drain for us

Another sign that the economists' central myth, their creation story in a sense -- that there is a replacement for anything scarce and the replacement appears whenever the price of the depeleting resource gets high enough -- is the most dangerous fantasy in the world:

Alas, there are no replacement carbon sinks, and we seemed to have filled ours up. Now we learn that, after you're through in the sinks, you head down the drain.

Eyes wide shut toward global collapse?

Ecological Footprint, Energy Consumption, and the Looming Collapse:

This article explores dynamic relations governing population growth, resource depletion, and world economics by means of a few simple modeling and simulation exercises. To this end, we start out by exploring the concept of an ecological footprint, representing the amount of land that a person needs to produce everything that he or she consumes: food, clothing, energy, shelter, the tools that are needed to make the clothing, etc. and place it in relation with the human development index, a measure of the quality of life of an individual. We then relate the ecological footprint to the per capita energy consumption. This discussion serves to provide a quantitative understanding of the limited resources that are at our disposal.

The article continues by exploring the dangers and seductions of exponential growth, and uses a system dynamics approach to illustrate why we are moving at a rapid pace toward global collapse with our eyes wide shut.

The article ends by discussing what we would need to do in order to avoid the looming collapse.

Making a market for solar in Eugene, Oregon

Eugene Water & Electric Board (EWEB) offers to buy solar power produced by customers at 15 cents/kWh.