US$20 billion: That’s how much American investors think Canadian taxpayers should fork over to compensate them for their failed bid to develop a liquefied natural gas (LNG) facility in Québec. That’s almost a fifth of the province’s total budget for […]
Why we must abolish the Energy Charter Treaty
Greta Thunberg made international headlines this week when she and other climate activists were briefly detained by police at a protest against the expansion of a coal mine in Germany. Thunberg was among the thousands of protesters who arrived to […]
Low-tech solutions
Most mainstream responses to climate chaos today rely heavily on high technology and big business. We rarely hear about solutions – often rooted in the past – that are localized, low-tech, and don’t advance the interests of large corporations. These […]
Getting out of the food-energy-climate crisis
On 11 October 2022, the International Monetary Fund’s head of research, Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas, warned that today’s high energy prices were not going away any time soon. The “energy crisis”, he cautioned, “is not a transitory shock”. The same could be […]
The dirty truth about clean energy
Everyone knows what needs to be done to bring down CO2 levels; pump less of it into the atmosphere. But instead of reducing overall energy consumption, the focus is on increasing ‘green’ energy consumption: electric vehicles, massive electric storage installations, […]
On Ukraine and the failed Pax Capitalis
During the previous three decades, a particularly new and ahistorical view of the world has arisen in the modern, “civilized,” capitalist West. Famously elaborated by an advisor to Ronald Reagan and later repeated by both liberal and conservative politicians, theorists, […]
On Technology’s Past and Future
Since the heyday of technological determinism in the 1960s, many authors have written eloquently about how developments in technology are more typically the outcome of particular social and economic arrangements. Some contributions that have significantly shaped my own thinking include: […]
