In Planet: Critical, Rachel Donald defends the thesis of 'no energy transition', saying my data 'is wonky'. But her approach makes major data errors, and obfuscates the potential for radical technological and economic transformation.
Tony Blair has declared that phasing out fossil fuels is "doomed to fail". But the hard data shows that what's really doomed is trying to keep fossil capitalism alive through carbon capture, AI and nuclear.
In popular book More and More and More, Jean-Baptiste Fressoz says the ‘energy transition’ is a myth as we consume more fossil fuels than ever. In doing so, he masks real, rapid energy transitions, past and present, all over the world: and obscures how renewables can help end the extraction economy
The planetary phase shift framework helps us to see the new era of Trump's trade wars as part of the last stages in the life-cycle of our civilisation - and the precursor to a rapid new geopolitical and economic reordering of the international system.
We are facing the end of 'the West'. Some of our best science shows the US empire is following the collapse-path of the USSR - but this is also the precursor to the emergence of a new life-cycle for civilisation.
The era of American energy dominance is coming to an end. And Trumpocracy 2.0's efforts to revive it through imperial hubris will accelerate the decline - because alternative facts can't trump biophysical reality.
Elon Musk is launching an authoritarian coup within the 2nd Trump presidency. Seen through planetary phase shift theory, this is a backslide into collapse. The battle lines are drawn. All humanity holds dear is at stake. We fight back by recognising our true power.
Superabundance is within reach. But ironically, the precondition to getting it is by giving it up. It sounds paradoxical, but this is actually the key to the next great leap in human evolution. I set this out with a rigorous scientific framework in my new paper on the Planetary Phase Shift.
A systems lens suggests a quarter of GDP could evaporate on a pathway to violent civil unrest, concentration camps, and genocidal violence that would be a free gift to Putin
We are all feeling it. Grief, despair, anxiety, chaos. This essay, which distils the planetary phase shift framework, gives you the tools to see through the chaos to recognise emerging possibilities of a new system that could enable superabundance beyond our wildest imaginations.
Unfolding conflict across Israel, Gaza, Lebanon and Iran is not just a regional breakdown, but a global systemic rupture in the context of the planetary phase shift as industrial civilisation moves through the last stages of its life-cycle.
When we look at the rise of the global far-right through a systems lens, we can recognise that it as a symptom of crisis and collapse - as well as the potential for renewal. Today, humanity stands at a political inflection point in which the only viable path forward involves total transformation.
Drawing on my research on genocidal colonial systems, I explore how the original concept of genocide invented by Polish Jewish jurist Raphael Lemkin suggests that Hamas and Israel are both complicit in the co-production of genocidal violence.
2024 - the opportunity for a new beginning. What has this newsletter achieved so far, and where do we go next on the journey toward our post-carbon future?
After decades exposing fossil fuel interests, I've realised it's not about dismantling the old. We must enable the new with finance, technology & system change. The West’s biggest carbon polluters are deflecting from this necessity, in ways that have carefully obscured what really derailed COP28.
The world's energy watchdog has called it - end of the oil age is imminent. But the world is deeply unprepared for what this means - and we're still underestimating the speed, scale and consequences of what's coming. This is the greatest disruption in human history. Here's how we get ready.
A global consensus is emerging – among both clean energy pioneers and even some of the world’s biggest fossil fuel producers – that the age of oil is over, and that we must do all we can to accelerate the clean transformation of the global energy system in a way that is just.
Collapse is not the end - it's the beginning. The fear and uncertainty of this time signals the obsolescence of old ways of being. As we step into the unknown, truly new ways of being are emerging. Our challenge is to seize on and amplify these opportunities.
Why are our societies, politics and culture getting more and more polarised? A systems lens reveals it's no accident. It's a symptom of the twilight of the current life-cycle of civilisation as a new one dawns. From ISIS to Brexit, the entire global system is flipping into a new order....
I got into a debate about whether we have enough materials for the clean energy transition with someone who I fundamentally disagree with - and we managed to talk it through to create a shared understanding about our emerging post-carbon future
As I travel to Bangladesh, the home of my ancestors, I reflect on how a country struggling to emerge from the ravages of colonisation faces the unprecedented opportunity to become a solar super power
