I was ten years old when The Limits to Growth first saw print. I have a dim memory of seeing a newspaper article or two about it, but I had other things on my mind in 1972—my parents got divorced that year, and an already difficult childhood promptly got much worse—and several years passed before…
Tag: economics
A Sense of Déjà Vu
Déjà vu—the sudden insistent feeling that you’ve encountered the present moment before—can be one of the oddest of human experiences. Sometimes, though, it happens for perfectly prosaic reasons. Right now, as I look at headlines and certain other indicators, I’m having a very strong case of déjà vu for reasons that require only the simplest…
A Faint Whiff of Lemonade
In last week’s post here on Ecosophia, we talked about the Great Reset, an allegedly new and innovative proposal for global economic reform currently being promoted with might and main by the World Economic Forum and a gaggle of other elite soapboxes. The point that struck me most forcefully about the program, as I noted…
The Great Leap Backward
If you happen to read the edgier end of the internet these days, you’ve probably seen talk about something called the Great Reset. I’ve been asked several times already what I think of it, and since the shape of the industrial world’s future is a longtime interest of mine, I was quite willing to discuss…
To the Shores of a Surging Ocean
I hope all of my readers who, like me, celebrated the solstice on Saturday had a grand time; that those who celebrated Hanukkah on Sunday did likewise; that those who celebrate Christmas are having a grand time today; and that those who celebrate other holidays around this time of year are feeling similarly blessed in…
Dancers at the End of Time, Part Three: A Mortal Splendor
Some of my critics like to insist that I never admit that I’m wrong. Those readers who have been following me for any length of time know that this isn’t true, but like so many of the fashionable distortions of our age, it points to a truth it doesn’t actually express. What offends those critics,…
Heating Up The Political Climate
Yes, we need to talk about climate change again, and it’s probably necessary to start with a point I’ve made on this blog several times already: anthropogenic climate change is real and serious, and it’s being exploited by political and corporate interests to push a dubious agenda on the public. Many people these days don’t…
Waiting for the Next Panic
When I first started blogging more than thirteen years ago, the main focus of my online essays was peak oil. It was a good time to discuss such things. The price of crude oil, which had been rattling around a little above its all-time lows for more than a decade, started rising not long after…
An Astrological Interlude: Libra Ingress 2019
A few days from now we’ll have arrived at the northern hemisphere’s autumn equinox, when the Sun crosses the celestial equator to bring spring to my readers in Australia and fall to me and my neighbors here in North America. The equinox is an important holy day to Druids and members of various other nature-centered…
The Dream of a Managed Society
My essay here two weeks ago on the way that the industrial world’s elites are beginning to back away from environmentalism, using chatter about “ecofascism” as a convenient excuse, got the lively response I expected. To be fair, there was also a certain amount of noise, and a certain number of exasperated demands that I…