MuseLetter #362 / May 2023 by Richard Heinberg Download printable PDF version Human activity—mostly the burning of fossil fuels—has raised Earth’s atmospheric carbon content by 50 percent, from 280 parts per million (ppm) to 420 ppm. Since the start of the Industrial Revolution, we’ve released approximately 950 billion metric tons of carbon into the air. Every year, humans emit more than […]

MuseLetter #360 / March 2023 by Richard Heinberg Download printable PDF version Why We Can’t Just Do It This month’s Museletter kicks off with a short response to the latest IPCC report and why we’re failing to curb carbon emissions despite the dire warnings. The second article looks at recent data from China on declining […]

MuseLetter #359 / February 2023 by Richard Heinberg Download printable PDF version This month’s Museletter leads with an article looking at various debt timebombs threatening us all. It also includes the concluding part of my trilogy written for Independent Media Institute on the renewable energy transition (parts 1 and 2 were included in Museletter #356, […]

MuseLetter #358 / January 2023 by Richard Heinberg Download printable PDF version Recent news articles about a breakthrough in nuclear fusion research heralded the potential for “limitless” energy. Whenever I read that word limitless I wince, because I’ve learned to view it as a subtle instruction to readers to “please stop thinking now.” After decades of false promises […]

MuseLetter #354 / September 2022 by Richard Heinberg Download printable PDF version In May I wrote about the emerging energy and food crisis gripping the world due largely to the Russia-Ukraine conflict. The crisis continues to unfold. However, most people are aware of it only via high prices—for gasoline, electricity, natural gas, and food—and through […]

In the 1970s, global political and corporate elites had all the information they needed to put the world on a path toward long-term stability. Systems science was sufficiently advanced that a team of its practitioners organized a scenario study to see how trends in industrial production, population, food, pollution, and resource usage might interact over the next few decades; the study showed that continued growth in population and industrial production would prove unsustainable.