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Richard Heinberg

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If we do nothing, we still get to a post-carbon future, but it will be bleak. However, if we plan the transition, we can have a world that supports robust communities of healthy, creative people and ecosystems with millions of other species.
Richard Heinberg [1]

Richard William Heinberg is an American journalist and educator who has written extensively on energy, economic, and ecological issues, including oil depletion. He is the author of 14 books, and presently serves as the senior fellow at the Post Carbon Institute.

Quotes

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2010s

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  • If we do nothing, we still get to a post-carbon future, but it will be bleak. However, if we plan the transition, we can have a world that supports robust communities of healthy, creative people and ecosystems with millions of other species.
  • Our core ecological problem is not climate change. It is overshoot, of which global warming is a symptom. Overshoot is a systemic issue. Over the past century-and-a-half, enormous amounts of cheap energy from fossil fuels enabled the rapid growth of resource extraction, manufacturing, and consumption; and these in turn led to population increase, pollution, and loss of natural habitat and hence biodiversity. The human system expanded dramatically, overshooting Earth’s long-term carrying capacity for humans while upsetting the ecological systems we depend on for our survival. Until we understand and address this systemic imbalance, symptomatic treatment (doing what we can to reverse pollution dilemmas like climate change, trying to save threatened species, and hoping to feed a burgeoning population with genetically modified crops) will constitute an endlessly frustrating round of stopgap measures that are ultimately destined to fail.

2020s

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  • During the last 200 years, per capita energy usage grew eight-fold, while human population expanded at about the same rate. As a result of energy growth, all the things we do with energy became more doable. Transportation, manufacturing, agriculture, and mining exploded in scale. Energy became so abundant that it seemed we could solve any human problem, now or in the future, just by throwing more energy at it. We even reconfigured our economic system so that it assumes and requires perpetual growth. But growth in fossil-fuel energy can’t continue much longer: depletion and climate change will see to that. And even if we make a wholehearted effort to switch to low-carbon energy sources, we face limits to nature’s supplies of materials with which to make solar panels, wind turbines, nuclear reactors, and batteries.
  • Prior to the widespread use of coal, oil, and natural gas, agrarian societies saw cyclical periods of rise and fall. But the scale of expansion since the dawn of the fossil-fueled industrial revolution, beginning roughly at the start of the 19th century, has been unprecedented. Energy usage per capita has grown 800 percent, as has population. Meanwhile, the contours of society have been transformed: for the first time in human history, most people now live in cities.
  • Fossil fuels enabled a dramatic expansion of energy usable by humanity, in turn enabling unprecedented growth in human population, economic activity, and material consumption.
  • Global human population has doubled three times in the past 200 years, surging from 1 billion in 1820 to 2 billion in 1927, to 4 billion in 1974, to 8 billion today. Its highest rate of growth was in the 1960s, at over 2 percent per year; that rate is now down to 1.1 percent. If growth continues at the current rate, we’ll have about 18 billion people on Earth by the end of this century. All of this would be fine if we lived on a planet that was itself expanding, doubling its available quantities of minerals, forests, fisheries, and soil every quarter-century, and doubling its ability to absorb industrial wastes. But we don’t. It is essentially the same beautiful but finite planet that was spinning through space long before the origin of humans.
  • Agriculture enabled population growth and social complexity, but it gradually robbed soils of nutrients. Sailing ships guided with clocks and navigational charts could increase the scope of trade, but building wooden ships (and making charcoal for forging steel) was leading to the deforestation of whole continents. A reckoning with limits seemed to be in store. Then a miracle happened. People who lived in some key centers of global trade started using fossil fuels—energy sources capable of delivering power in previously unimaginable and seemingly endless quantities. Coal, oil, and natural gas enabled the development of transport technologies (steamships, railroads, cars, trucks, and airplanes) that overcame prior limits to the speed of travel and trade, so that products and resources that were abundant in one place could be transported to places where they were scarce. Fossil fuels could be used to increase the rates of resource extraction via powered mining machinery, and to process lower grades of ores as more concentrated ores were depleted. They could be fashioned into plastics and chemicals to substitute for some natural materials that were getting scarce, such as hardwoods and whale oil. And they could be made into artificial fertilizers, which could replace soil nutrients lost due to unsustainable agricultural practices. All these developments together enabled population growth at rates that far outstripped historic trends: human numbers expanded from one billion to eight billion in a mere two centuries. We were, in effect, stretching existing constraints on population and consumption to the point that it was difficult for many people to see that boundaries still existed at all.
  • As we’ve grown our population and our per capita consumption rates, we’ve been taking habitat away from other organisms. As a result, nature is in full retreat. Vertebrate and invertebrate animal species have suffered average population declines of 70 percent in the past 50 years, and thousands of plant species are endangered as well.
  • For a population of field mice in overshoot, the critical resource might consist of small plants whose unusually robust growth has been triggered by high levels of rainfall. For humanity currently, the critical resource is fossil energy. Temporary energy abundance has led to many good things (for some of us, anyway): more food, more people, more commercial products, more knowledge, more comfort, and more convenience. But we are about to become victims of our own success.
  • It’s sad when loved ones die, and few of us look forward to our own demise; hence the perennial quest for an elixir of eternal life, or at least a cure for cancer. But if nobody died, the planet would quickly fill with humans and empty of all the things that feed and provision us. Death clears space for new life; it is the non-negotiable price of admission to the great banquet of existence.
  • …civilization’s survival dilemma in the 21st century is best described by a concept from population ecology—overshoot. This refers to the situation where a crucial resource temporarily becomes more abundant, thereby enabling a group of organisms to grow its population beyond levels that can be sustained over the long run. For a population of field mice in overshoot, the critical resource might consist of small plants whose unusually robust growth has been triggered by high levels of rainfall. For humanity currently, the critical resource is fossil energy. Temporary energy abundance has led to many good things (for some of us, anyway): more food, more people, more commercial products, more knowledge, more comfort, and more convenience. But we are about to become victims of our own success.
  • The past few thousand years of human history have already seen several critical accelerators. The creation of the first monetary systems roughly 5,000 years ago enabled a rapid expansion of trade that ultimately culminated in our globalized financial system. Metal weapons made warfare deadlier, leading to the takeover of less-well-armed human societies by kingdoms and empires with metallurgy. Communication tools (including writing, the alphabet, the printing press, radio, television, the internet, and social media) amplified the power of some people to influence the minds of others. And, in the past century or two, the adoption of fossil fuels facilitated resource extraction, manufacturing, food production, and transportation, enabling rapid economic expansion and population growth. Of those four past accelerators, our adoption of fossil fuels was the most potent and problematic. In just two centuries, energy usage per capita has increased eightfold, as has the size of the human population. The period since 1950, which has seen a dramatic increase in the global reliance on petroleum, has also seen the fastest economic and population growth in all of human history. Indeed, historians call it the “Great Acceleration.” Neoliberal economists hail the Great Acceleration as a success story, but its bills are just starting to come due. Industrial agriculture is destroying Earth’s topsoil at a rate of tens of billions of tons per year. Wild nature is in retreat, with animal species having lost, on average, 70 percent of their numbers in the past half-century. And we’re altering the planetary climate in ways that will have catastrophic repercussions for future generations. It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the whole human enterprise has grown too big, and that it is turning nature (“resources”) into waste and pollution far too quickly to sustain itself. The evidence suggests we need to slow down, and, in some cases at least, reverse course by reducing population, consumption, and waste.
  • Thank you, Peter, for... this important and timely book. ...I’ve been following your work for several years, and I discussed it in my own recent book, Power: Limits and Prospects for Human Survival. The data-driven, mathematical methods you and your colleagues have developed for understanding patterns in history seem highly illuminating. In the U.S., rising economic inequality (since the 1970s) has immiserated the working class, while the number of elites (e.g., billionaires) and elite aspirants (e.g., people with law degrees) has skyrocketed. As you show... these developments align with a historical pattern seen repeatedly in complex societies, and... never seems to end well. In End Times, you lay out... what your analysis means for the United States in the 2020s. It’s not a pretty picture. ...we’re seeing the evidence of increasing polarization and political ill will everywhere.
    • Richard Heinberg, "Are These the End Times? A conversation with Peter Turchin, author of End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration, about the prognosis for social breakdown in 2020s." (July 29, 2023)
  • Depleting and climate-changing coal, oil, and natural gas have brought about dramatic human population growth, along with immense profits and unprecedented wealth (for the few). But all of these presumed and probably transitory benefits have been based on depleting natural resources, and on processes that are perilously changing the climate and degrading ecosystems across the planet. Every time we pick up a gasoline-powered machine we are viscerally linked to that chain of ersatz benefits and spiraling impacts.
  • Climate change is a wicked problem… [and] there is no way to solve it without sacrificing something that society currently holds dear, and without thereby generating more problems. For example, shrinking the economy would reduce carbon emissions, but it would throw a lot of people out of work (in effect, we did trial runs during the financial crash of 2008 and the COVID pandemic of 2020; both times, carbon emissions plunged, yet everyone was eager to “get back to normal”). Building vast amounts of low-carbon energy-producing and energy-using infrastructure would also reduce emissions, but that would require tens of trillions of dollars of investment as well as enormous quantities of depleting, non-renewable minerals—the mining of which would generate pollution and destroy wildlife habitat.

Quotes about Richard Heinberg

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  • The world, our world, finds itself caught between a rock and hard place. The relationship that we humans have developed with fossil energy over the last 250 years is a textbook definition of an addiction, and increasingly looks like a Faustian pact: we know that it’s slowly killing us, we know we should be leaving it in the ground and we also know that we will someday have to live without it anyway, yet we just can’t stop burning it and we can’t get enough of it, because we have multiplied our numbers and built our whole world around it. The detox “replacement medications” that we are using do not seem to be working so far, even as we keep increasing their doses. We are of course “pledging” to try harder and harder in the future, yet we keep relapsing into our fossil addiction, year after year, day after day, one flight at a time, one car ride at a time, one purchase at a time, one degree of comfort or of convenience at a time. By doing so we keep turning our eyes and minds away from the real nature of the upcoming and inevitable “energy transition”, the only one that is in fact likely to happen in our lifetimes, and which as Richard Heinberg said will almost certainly be a transition “from using a lot to using a lot less”.
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