Articles by JMG

When people ask silly questions

"If fossil fuels are the problem, wouldn't running out of them be good?"

There's an old joke about economists and other Panglossians that bears on this question:

A man leaps off the top of a skyscraper and, as he passes by each floor, true to his optimistic tendencies, he says, "Well, so far, so good."

Running out of fossil fuels is like this man running out of floors. The critical thing is not to jump ... i.e., not to commit all that carbon to the atmosphere in the first place.

The ubiquitous Richard Heinberg talks with Acres USA

Interesting interview with Richard Heinberg about the effects of peak oil on U.S. agriculture, in Acres USA, "A voice for Eco Agriculture."

Corporatists overestimate environmental response costs every time

A friend sends an article from a legal publication that makes an important point about economists and other naysayers who insist that addressing global climate disruption will be too expensive. (Oddly, the same people always gassing on about boundless human potential when it comes to imagining new substitutes for depleting resources always forget to incorporate that creativity in their projections of the cost of fixing environmental problems.)

A key excerpt (my emphasis):

Biofuel facilities that use fossil fuels help no one, waste resources.

The Onion, America's Finest News Source (TM), once told of a special device for dealing with a lost TV remote: a remote you could use to make the other TV remote beep, so you could find it underneath the discarded pizza boxes and such.

Little did the Onion writers know that Big Coal and Corporate Agribusiness would apply that same principle to produce a horde of monsters, the so-called "biofuels plants," facilities with a voracious appetite for fossil fuels, particularly yummy coal.