scientist, author, Senior Fellow at the Post-Carbon Institute, and one of the foremost analysts of our energy future, explained it to me: In short, our rate of consumption is overshooting our planet’s sustainable sources of production. According to the Global Footprint Network, humanity is currently using the equivalent of 1.75 Earths to provide th

In Africa, for example, it’s a matter of clearing land to grow food and fuel for the continent’s growing population. Nigeria, which has had one of the highest deforestation rates in the world, has lost more than 60 percent of its forest cover since 1990, and it’s one of the world’s biggest exporters of charcoal, which is created by charring wood.

The Indians, then, who had the wisdom and the grace to live in this country for perhaps ten thousand years without destroying or damaging any of it, needed for their travels no more than a footpath; but their successors, who in a century and a half plundered the area of at least half its topsoil and virtually all of its forest, felt immediately tha

More than $30 a barrel was a demand-destroying price and by 1986 oil was again selling at just $13 a barrel, setting the stage for yet another round of globalization—this time centered on China, whose rapid modernization was driven by Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms and by massive foreign investment. Two generations later, only those who lived thr