Sublime

[We have words in our language that help to remind us of the balance that this relationship requires. One of those words is mamabezu; it means “he or she has enough.” It is an acknowledgment that an individual has what they need to live their life with a sense of safety and dignity. Another word, alabezu, means “everyone has enough.” The “everyone”

humans already appropriate 30%-40% of all NPP as food, feed, fiber, and fuel, with wood and crop residues supplying about 10% of TPES

It’s the amount of energy you put in for the amount of energy you get out. Once you’ve passed “peak,” it doesn’t matter how much energy you put in, you’ll get less and less out — until you reach the point at which no matter how much energy you put in, there is no return, because there is nothing left to extract. How you measure energy invested and

The end of the age of cheap abundant energy thus brings with it an unavoidable reshaping of our most basic ideas about economic development. For the last three centuries or so, as already discussed, the effective meaning of this phrase has centered on the replacement of human labor by machines powered by fossil fuel. All the other measures of devel

“It’s as if giving up on saving the world,” writes eco-visionary Charles Eisenstein, “opens us up to doing the things that will save the world.”8

Here, Richard Heinberg and his team at the Post-Carbon Institute return from their deep dives into economic trends and energy metrics to tell us “the Game is over” and we

“Our economy is at war with many forms of life on earth, including human life,”45 and sometimes the solution: we need a “Marshall Plan for the Earth.”

this idea, the petroleum energy obtained per foot of drilling effort declined from about 50 barrels of oil equivalent in 1946 to about 15 in 1978.