Monthly Archives: January 2014

Could economic growth actually end? The environmental study “Limits to Growth”, published in the 1970’s, was the result of the digitally modeled inventory of the worlds resources and depletion rates. At that time Limits to Growth suggested that sometime after 2020 world economic growth would slow or even stop as environmental hard limits were reached. The books was revised each decade and the conclusions remained pretty fixed – growth would end. This book, “The End of Growth” explores the possibility that limits to growth might exists and that we might now be bumping up against such limits.

Economists rarely recognize limits to growth since economists believe that resource substitution and ingenuity will always prevail thus opening up new frontiers for future growth. This gives me warm fuzzy feeling but the evidence for it has some huge gaps. More on this later. Continue reading →

The fight for energy that we see going on now has been going on for centuries. And this book is an amazing summary of the key historical events.

From the first oil wells, the to Russian natural gas pipeline fights, to shale gas, and tight oil this book covers the fight for fortunes that have been ongoing since the industrial revolution. Continue reading →