What I’ve Learned Writing About Energy Descent on Medium

After the fall, what comes next?

Things are getting crowded around here. Is anybody listening? Source: Library of Congress, photo archives. No usage restrictions.

In this post, I want to do a look-back to my writings on a topic that continues to loom large for humanity’s future: energy descent. As climate change bears down on us like a runaway train, and as oil and its derivatives become more scarce and eventually unaffordable, what happens next? Among the 75 posts I have written since 2020, six have dealt with these issues of energy descent, and related topics. Here’s what I have learned.

Post-Carbon Energy: Collapse or Descent?

This is pretty much the number one question among amateur and professional futurologists alike. Once our Age of Oil comes to an end, either through depletion or abandonment of the planet’s remaining oil, gas, and coal reserves, what kind of energy future will we be facing, a complete collapse of the human enterprise or something less severe, a radical simplification, localization, and shrinkage of our human footprint on a much hotter and dangerous Planet Earth? I devoted several posts to this question.

Energy Transitions in the Pipeline

There is a school of thought, prominent here on Medium, that sees an energy transition away from fossil fuels as essentially impossible…