Richard Heinberg

Whilst it would be easy to dismiss Richard Heinberg as a grumpy pastoralist who wishes us all to return to the land, he does raise many valid points about modern society's reliance on cheap energy and the token dismissal of future energy problems being solved by the vague cloud of "technology".

I do however feel his love of primitive peoples undermines some of his arguments. Whilst the series of essays has some good material in terms of Peak Oil, evolution of modern society and America's post show more ww2 boom, there's some curveballs in there. One such example is as a "letter from the future" which takes an otherwise non fiction book straight into the realm of speculative fiction and just feels out of place; it almost reads as a blurb of a teen dystopian novel.

Overall, it's not a bad book on the topic of society's decline but I wouldn't be rushing out for a copy. show less

As a person, I generally like Richard Heinberg, and wanted to like his book. But often I found myself infuriated reading this. The book itself has a textbook-like sterility to it, with many infoboxes and charts giving more specific detail on certain topics. And the writing feels robotic, as if written from the perspective of an alien from another world looking impersonally down on the world. Beyond that the language is clearly calculated to avoid alienating the typical middle class reader. show more It seems clear that Heinberg deliberately skewers the strength of his own expertise in order to keep people from panicking.

For instance, the thesis of the book, as the title suggests, is that economic growth has come to an end. Although one might assume that means the economy is headed towards a decline, he studiously avoids saying this in any clear terms. He actually seems to try to comfort his readers by suggesting that we can manage something of a steady-state economy, if one with a different series of assumptions and values than the current systems. He neglects to consider that what we're actually looking at is an economic crash of unprecedented speed and magnitude, in spite of the consistency of this idea with his own research.

But where Heinberg frustrates me the most is when, after noting a few of the ways in which our way of life is killing the planet, he writes:

"Declining oxygen levels, acidifying oceans, disappearing species, threatened oceanic food chains, changing climate-- when considering planetary changes of this magnitude, it may seem that the end of economic growth is hardly the worst of humanity's current problems. However, it is important to remember that we are counting on growth to enable us to solve or respond to environmental crises. With economic growth, we have surplus money with which to protect rainforests, save endangered species, and clean up after industrial accidents. Without economic growth, we are increasingly defenseless against environmental disasters-- many of which paradoxically result from growth itself." He goes on to say that "the end of economic growth cannot be counted on to solve the environmental problems that growth has previously generated".

The first absurdity to strike me in the above passage is when the author says that "we are counting on growth" to solve our environmental crises. I don't know about Richard, but I'm certainly not counting on growth to solve anything. And although some people absolutely do believe this, that is largely because people are heavily invested in this system, and believe they can destroy the planet and live on it, too. Also, Heinberg tactfully ignores that far more capital is used to destroy rainforests, kill endangered species, and cause industrial disasters than to solve them. If we genuinely want to stop these disasters, we're going to need to reduce the power of capital, and reduce our total energy usage, by whatever means necessary. As for his statement that we cannot count on the end of growth to solve our environmental problems, this is true. The problem is too dire to count on any proposed solution. That's exactly why we need to do everything we possibly can as soon as we possibly can. Bringing fossil fuel economies to a dead stop, ending deforestation, and restoring prairies and wetlands will not absolutely, without a doubt, stop climate change from becoming runaway and devastating the planet's biosphere, but it sure sounds a far more reasonable avenue than hoping some magical technological solution will come along if we just hold our breath long enough. Certainly, the author tactfully avoids making any effort to show how his own proposals will help to prevent environmental calamities, let alone to proactively solve them. show less

Within the first sentence of his book, author Richard Heinberg clearly states his central assertion--economic growth as we know it is over. Heinberg, a Senior Fellow of Post Carbon Institute, goes on to explain in detail and in language understandable to those who are not economists the evidence that supports his claim. He provides an overview of how our dependence on economic growth evolved and then details the circumstances that have brought growth to an end. He points to three factors show more responsible for growth’s end—resource depletion, environmental impacts, and systemic financial and monetary failures. He provides evidence of how each of these factors has stymied growth and why we cannot expect economic growth to resume.

This is a scary read. Heinberg paints a bleak picture of what we can expect as our current economic assumptions hit environmental and financial realities. However, he also provides hope. He outlines three strategies that individuals need to pursue to prepare for the end of growth—disengage from consumerism, get out of debt, and become more self-sufficient. Collectively our highest priority needs to be maintenance of social cohesion. Local communities must unite to solve the problems brought by mounting economic and environmental challenges. Heinberg describes experiments already being undertaken by communities to create new economic models. Throughout the book, Heinberg refers to enough printed resources to fill a bookcase.

This is an important book. Heinberg challenges us to examine our economic assumptions and to transform how we individually and culturally define success and happiness. Resisting current economic realities will heighten the future pain we experience as individuals and as a society. There is hope, however, if we can set a course toward sustainability that upholds the integrity of our living planet. show less

This book covers much of the same ground as James Howard Kunstler's the Long Emergency (2006), but shows much greater precision and professionalism, and strikes a humanist rather than a misanthropic tone. Heinberg's core argument runs something like this: 1. Our global economy relies on perpetual growth, which is an illusion. Under the influence of that illusion, we've allowed debt in all forms -- household, corporate, governmental -- to swell to unsustainable levels. 2. While the 2008 Great show more Recession reflected the partial bursting of a housing bubble, it also marks the end (or beginning of the end) of growth, because: (a) the world is experiencing peak oil (and peak extraction of other resources), and in fact arriving at that peak is part of what caused the recession; or (b) even if peaking of resource extraction didn't cause the recession, it will make it impossible to relaunch the economy and unwind debt, and sooner or later the debt crisis will cause a massive global economic contraction. 3. Innovation and substitution can't save us because we've reached the practical limits of both of those.

Chapter 5 suggests possible implications for the world economy over the next several years. Chapters 6 and 7 are essentially bibliographic essays outlining a range of macro policy solutions and individual household approaches to weather the coming economic storms. Heinberg believes it's not too late to save civilization, but he's skeptical that our existing governments and power structures will take needed actions on a national or international scale, so individuals and communities need to prepare now to sustain themselves.

As you might guess, the linchpin of Heinberg's argument is his belief (articulated in chapter 4) that innovation and efficiency cannot punch a way out of the world's debt overhang and resource constraints. But this part of his argument, it seems to me, is deeply flawed, in at least two respects. First, Heinberg suggests that everything we do falls into a few categories of activities -- communication, transport, trade, and manufacturing -- and we have approached the limit of doing these things quickly and cheaply. But that misconceives innovation, for which the key measure is the ratio of human time required to produce a given quality of life. The whole point of sustainability is that we have vast room for improving this ratio. Given the huge externalities in our current economy, there's a lot of opportunity left to use the same or greater time for a much, much higher quality of life. For example, Heinberg notes that few consumer products (like shampoo) have significantly changed in the last several decades; advances mostly reflect tastes driven by marketing. But wouldn't it be a significant step forward - with a positive return for society -- for companies to redesign shampoo to omit endocrine-disrupting chemicals? (And anyway, why should advertising-driven changes in tastes, or, for that matter, planned obsolescence of consumer goods, not be used to carry growth in a steady state economy?).

A second, related problem is that Heinberg is focused on the wrong scale -- he argues that we're reaching the limits of positive returns on improving individual goods and services. But we use goods and services in systems, or as part of a lifestyle, and the relationship between the individual goods we buy and their collective impact on our lives is not linear. Changing a few goods can radically shift how they collectively work in our lives, and which we value the most. That opens up new vistas for growth. For a simple example, think about the difference between a walkman, an ipod, and an iphone. For Heinberg, these would appear to simply be a progression of improvements in the same basic functional unit: a portable audio player. But in context, the ipod offers a huge quality of life improvement over the walkman that means it is actually used differently (people stop buying cassettes; they may even give up having a distinct home stereo system). The iphone adds layers of efficiency by bundling the audio function into a tool that does a bunch of other things at the same time. And, in the process, the transition has created entirely new economic niches - for example, services like Pandora or Spotify. I don't know whether ipods or iphones have a smaller life-cycle resource footprint per unit of quality of life than a walkman, but I can see how they might, particularly factoring in the elimination of cassettes and cds in favor of digital recordings. It's particularly frustrating that Heinberg misses this point about scale, since he discusses (skeptically) Amory Lovins' claims about the prospects for gains in energy efficiency. One of Lovins' central insights is that true innovation isn't a matter of climbing a cost curve; it's breaking through a curve to find a new state. Heinberg doesn't address this perspective, but without an answer for it, he hasn't closed off the prospects for continued growth.

Overall, while I don't buy the 'coming collapse' argument, this is the best version I've seen of it. The chapters on public policy and local level solutions is also worthwhile for the introduction they provide to other current thinkers and writers. Heinberg is clearly plugged in to these alternative perspectives on the US and global economy, and serves as a good guide to them. The book is not particularly useful on environmental issues; Heinberg cites natural disasters caused by climate change as another reason current patterns of growth are unsustainable, but he does not really discuss how greenhouse gas emission reductions will emerge from or contribute to either a business-as-usual collapse or a managed economic contraction. show less