Power: Limits and Prospects for Human Survival

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Post Carbon Institute: Energy, Climate, and Collapse

10 episodes

6 months ago

First wisdom, then action. Richard Heinberg shares insights from his deep dive into the nature of power and power relationships. He addresses the three main "power tools": money, weapons, and communication technologies with humble and thoughtful advice on how to approach them. You’ll have the chance to contemplate how you might live your most authentic life with moderation, rationality, responsibility, and sometimes sacrifice. And you’ll learn how to evaluate potential solutions to global env...

Earth Sciences

Science

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Earth Sciences

Science

Episodes (10/10)

Power: Limits and Prospects for Human Survival

How to Navigate Power with Wisdom

2 years ago

21 minutes

Power: Limits and Prospects for Human Survival

Powered Down and Better Off

Learn how humanity can exercise collective self-restraint to navigate the social and environmental crises of the 21st century. The world is in overshoot. There are too many people consuming too much stuff, and we're facing climate change, biodiversity loss, and immense social inequality. We're currently on a pathway to collapse, but the future doesn't have to be bleak. We can develop communities where we take care of one another and the ecosystems we inhabit. By understanding power relationsh...

2 years ago

1 hour 1 minute

Power: Limits and Prospects for Human Survival

Optimal Power

Overpopulation, overconsumption, and overexploitation of Earth's resources go way beyond the realm of simple problems with straightforward solutions. Instead, they are dilemmas that require tradeoffs and difficult decisions. To guide such decisions, energy and sustainability expert Richard Heinberg explores big ideas such as the adaptive cycle, resilience theory, and prudent predator theory. Heavy topics abound, from death to extinction to societal collapse, but Richard proposes the "optimum ...

2 years ago

54 minutes

Power: Limits and Prospects for Human Survival

Overpowered: The Days of Climate Chaos

As exploitation of fossil fuels powered exponential growth in population and consumption, humanity began running into problems. Serious problems. The existential kind, like the potential for runaway global warming and the onset of the sixth mass extinction. For many problems, a solution exists, but what happens when a selected solution actually generates more problems? Energy and sustainability expert Richard Heinberg explains the difference between problems and dilemmas, and discusses how to...

2 years ago

55 minutes

Power: Limits and Prospects for Human Survival

Fossil Fuels Changed Everything

Over the 19th and 20th centuries physical power, social power, and economies grew explosively. The main cause was humanity’s exploitation of fossil fuels. Sources of oil, coal, and natural gas – a vast underground storehouse of ancient sunlight – provided an almost magical and seemingly unlimited supply of energy to grow more food, provision more people, build more cities, and create more technologies. But this age of "more" also brought global warfare, consumerism, and overproduction. Improv...

2 years ago

1 hour 1 minute

Power: Limits and Prospects for Human Survival

The Rise of Social Inequality

Richard Heinberg, renowned energy and sustainability expert, explores the development of social power – simply defined as the ability to get other people to do something. Whether through money, violence, writing, or other means, humans have devised interesting ways of exerting influence over one another. One major downside, with implications for the collapse of societies, is widespread inequality. Concentration of social power tends to create social instability. You'll hear how power acts as ...

2 years ago

51 minutes

Power: Limits and Prospects for Human Survival

Fire, Tools, and Language

Join renowned energy and sustainability expert, Richard Heinberg, as he describes the flow of power in hunter-gatherer communities of the Pleistocene. As people learned to wield fire, deploy an array of tools, and coordinate actions through increasingly descriptive language, they became more capable of concentrating power. This development produced mind-blowing impacts on brain capacity and other aspects of human evolution. As you go back in time to the dawn of civilization, you'll become fam...

2 years ago

44 minutes

Power: Limits and Prospects for Human Survival

Power in Nature

To understand humanity's relationship with energy and power, and to get a handle on why we're experiencing a polycrisis of climate change, social inequality, and loss of biodiversity, you have to go back to the beginning – all the way back to the origins of life on Earth. Explore how power functions in nature, including predator/prey relationships, self-balancing mechanisms in organisms and ecosystems, and the maximum power principle. Along the way, you'll tour exotic locations like the Grand...

2 years ago

51 minutes

Power: Limits and Prospects for Human Survival

Introduction to Power

Climate change, biodiversity loss, resource depletion, poverty, and inequality are all symptoms of one overarching problem: the way we humans accumulate and use power. If we want to address this problem and reduce the chances of a chaotic collapse of society, we will have to confront our overuse and abuse of power. But first we'll need to define power (both physical and social) and learn how energy flows through ecosystems and human society. Take a tour of these topics with succinct explanati...

2 years ago

41 minutes

Power: Limits and Prospects for Human Survival

Trailer for Power: Limits and Prospects for Human Survival

How have humans become powerful enough to disrupt the world's climate, trigger the sixth mass extinction, and cause serious harm to the biosphere? And with all the abilities and technologies we've accrued, why do we so often oppress instead of uplift one another? Join us as we explore the hidden driver behind the converging crises of the 21st century. It all comes down to power - our pursuit of it, overuse of it, and abuse of it. Learn how different forms of power arose, what they mean for us...

2 years ago

1 minute