All Posts (201-300)

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By xraymike79: Some Fun Facts for a Dystopic Future (November 2, 2016)

By Gail Tverberg: Why energy prices are ultimately headed lower; what the IMF missed (October 11, 2016)

Supply & Demand (September 28, 2016)

By Gail Zawacki: The Waste Land (September 25, 2016)

By Nate Hagens: The Speech that should have been given at the Republican National Convention (July 28, 2016)

Bailing in the Wrong Direction (July 11, 2016)

On the Quantity and Quality of Women (July 4, 2016)

By Alice Friedemann: An Interview on Energy (July 1, 2016)

What would a wise society do? (June 27, 2016)

By Allan Stromfeldt Christensen: Book Review: The Oracle of Oil (June 26, 2016)

Denial is Amazing! (June 25, 2016)

By Adam Taggart: Flight to Safety (June 25, 2016)

On the Wealth of Citizens: An EU Perspective (June 24, 2016)

By USFS: Forest Service survey finds record 66 million dead trees in southern Sierra Nevada (June 23, 2016)

By Gail Tverberg: China: Is peak coal part of its problem? (June 21, 2016)

Denial is Layered: What is Your Blind Spot? (June 21, 2016)

book review: On The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin (June 21, 2016)

book review: Our Renewable Future by Richard Heinberg and David Fridley (June 18, 2016)

David J.C. MacKay: Thank You and Goodbye (June 17, 2016)

Brexit Breeze? (June 16, 2016)

A Deadly Recipe: One Part Ignorance, One Part Denial (June 1, 2016)

By Tom Randall: Earth’s Relentless Warming Just Hit a Terrible New Threshold (May 28, 2016)

By Sam Carana: Arctic Sea Ice gone by September 2016? (May 28, 2016)

By The New York Times: Venezuela Drifts Into New Territory: Hunger, Blackouts and Government Shutdown (May 28, 2016)

By John House, MD: A Superb Summary of Our Predicament (May 19, 2016)

By Chris Martenson: Chaos and Volatility On the Rise (May 7, 2016)

By Eric Lindberg: 21 Stories of Transition and the Great Imagining: Why Transition Matters (May 6, 2016)

On Noam Chomsky and Requiem for the American Dream (May 5, 2016)

The UK: A State of unDenial? (May 3, 2016)

By Gail Tverberg: Debt: The Key Factor Connecting Energy and the Economy (May 2, 2016)

Interest(ing) Denial: 0% for 90 Months (April 30, 2016)

By Mark Williams et al.: The Anthropocene (Human Impact by the Numbers) (April 29, 2016)

Renewable vs. Fossil Energy: An Interesting Natural Experiment is Underway in Venezuela (April 27, 2016)

By Dahr Jamail: Global Fisheries Are Collapsing — What Happens When There Are No Fish Left? (April 26, 2016)

book review: A Full Life: Reflections at Ninety by Jimmy Carter (April 26, 2016)

José Mujica (April 26, 2016)

Ocean Acidification in My Front Yard (April 26, 2016)

On the Leap Manifesto (April 25, 2016)

WASF (April 24, 2016)

By NOAA: State of the Climate (April 24, 2016)

Denial of the Inconvenient Truth: Shrink the Economy or Die (April 24, 2016)

By Nate Hagens: A Guide to Being Human in the 21st Century: Resource Depletion, Behavior and the Environment (April 21, 2016)

It’s April 20 and 23 C here, meanwhile, on the other side of our planet… (April 20, 2016)

By James Hansen: I Don’t Think I’m an Alarmist (April 14, 2016)

Can you spot the trend? (April 14, 2016)

Human: From 3,000,000,000 to 7,400,000,000 (April 14, 2016)

Something is Afoot (April 13, 2016)

Canadian Federal NDP Party Melt Down (April 11, 2016)

By Erik Lindberg: Six Myths About Climate Change that Liberals Rarely Question (April 9, 2016)

By Smarter Every Day: The Backwards Brain Bicycle (April 7, 2016)

Overshoot Awareness: The Pros and Cons (April 5, 2016)

Utopia: What’s Wrong with Curing Malaria? (April 4, 2016)

Denial and Depression: An Informal Survey and Analysis (April 4, 2016)

Mr. Robot: What Is It About Society That Disappoints You? (April 3, 2016)

By Süddeutsche Zeitung: Panama Papers: The Secrets of Dirty Money (April 3, 2016)

Not April Fools (April 1, 2016)

On the Origin of Life (April 1, 2016)

By Gail Zawacki: Earth Embalmed (April 1, 2016)

By Jack Alpert: How Much Degrowth is Enough? (March 29, 2016)

By Chris Martenson: We’re Not Going To Make It… without real sacrifice (March 29, 2016)

book review: The Vital Question: Energy, Evolution, and the Origins of Complex Life by Nick Lane (March 29, 2016)

By Gail Tverberg: Why We Have a Wage Inequality Problem (March 29, 2016)

By Paul Chefurka: No really, how sustainable are we? (March 29, 2016)

By Ray Grigg: The Evolution of Denial (March 26, 2016)

By Big Picture RT: Mass Extinction is Closer Than You Know (March 26, 2016)

Why is my message so unpopular? (March 25, 2016)

Overpopulation Denial (March 25, 2016)

It’s Really a Shame (March 23, 2016)

By James Hansen: Ice Melt, Sea Level Rise and Superstorms (March 22, 2016)

Denial is the Only Topic Less Popular than Overshoot (March 20, 2016)

By John Weber: Solar Devices Industrial Infrastructure (March 19, 2016)

By Gail Tverberg: Our Economic Growth System is Reaching Limits in a Strange Way (March 17, 2016)

By Kim Hill: What’s Wrong with Renewable Energy? (March 13, 2016)

By Mac10: The Idiocracy Doesn’t Believe In Reality (March 13, 2016)

By Mac10: Preparing The Vertical Mega Crash. Check. (March 11, 2016)

By Survival Acres: Planetary Emergency (March 9, 2016)

By John Weber: Superman Plays With Kryptonite Dice (March 3, 2016)

Tim Garrett: On the Nature of Growth, and Our Special Place (February 23, 2016)

By Baba Brinkman: God of the Gaps (February 19, 2016)

The Best Idea for Population Reduction (February 10, 2016)

By Chris Martenson: The Return of Crisis (February 8, 2016)

By Mac10: The Tool or the One That Follows? (February 8, 2016)

By Richard Smith: Green Capitalism: The God That Failed (February 7, 2016)

By Mac10: Denialation: “This Is Not Already Happening To Me” (February 6, 2016)

By The School of Life: Wisdom (February 5, 2016)

By A Chemist in Langley: On the Empty Platitudes of the Anti-pipeline Advocates (February 5, 2016)

book review: The Alchemy of Air by Thomas Hager (February 3, 2016)

Why We Want Growth, Why We Can’t Have It, and What This Means (January 30, 2016)

We Owe Our Existence to Haber-Bosch (January 29, 2016)

By Dermot O’Conner: There’s No Tomorrow (January 29, 2016)

COP21 Revisited (January 28, 2016)

By Nate Hagens: A Birds Eye View of the Future (January 28, 2016)

One Less Blog to Follow (January 27, 2016)

By Ron Patterson: A Closer Look at OPEC (January 24, 2016)

By Robert Marston Fanney: Warm Arctic Storms Aim to Unfreeze the North Pole Again — That’s 55 Degrees (F) Above Normal For January (January 23, 2016)

By Zero Hedge: What Crisis is the Gold/Oil Ratio Predicting This Time? (January 17, 2016)

On David Wasdell’s Apollo-Gaia Project: Denial to the Moon (January 14, 2016)

By Yann Arthus-Bertrand: Human: Pleasure and Happiness (January 13, 2016)

Cause for Hope, Despair, or Both? (January 13, 2016)

By Ron Patterson: Confessions of a Doomer (January 8, 2016)

(next 100) (previous 100)

For explaining why humans are odd
To Varki and Brower we applaud
A great mystery they solved
With denial we evolved
And created the Higgs, overshoot, and God

Denial not only makes us believe in god, it is god, because denial created us, and denial may destroy us.

The human brain, the God it believes in, and the overshoot it enabled and denies, all resulted from the same improbable genetic adaptation that occurred about 100,000 years ago.

Denial is the reality that must be most aggressively denied to avoid collapsing the house of cards that keeps us functioning.

The most amazing thing about human overshoot is that we do not discuss it.

You know you are in trouble when reduced CO2 emissions from an economic collapse caused by low-cost oil depletion is not sufficient to prevent civilization collapse from climate change caused by previously emitted CO2.

Our only choices are do we want to fall from a higher elevation later, or climb down from a lower elevation sooner?

Things that can’t continue usually stop too late.

Truth is like poetry and most people hate poetry.

All 8 billion of us owe our existence to a six-inch layer of topsoil and the fact it rains; 6 billion of us also owe our existence to nitrogen fertilizer created from natural gas by Haber-Bosch factories.

Each time history repeats itself, the price goes up.

Thermodynamics, expressed through genetics, creates beings incapable of not maximizing energy consumption.

Denial is evolution’s solution for permitting intelligence to coexist with our (Maximum Power Principle) subconscious decision makers.

While it digs its own grave, all the mind can do is entertain fantasies and create excuses.

It is remarkable that a brain emerged from a cloud of hydrogen and figured out the laws of physics that governed, and possibly made inevitable, its own creation and destruction.

We have met the oblivious and they are us.

All 8 billion of us originated from one small tribe in Africa about 100,000 years ago that gave birth to a child with an improbable mutation for a more powerful brain that denied reality. The other tribes were soon toast and we took over the planet. We’re all close cousins. I love you all. Except the deniers.

Meaning comes from understanding why we can understand there is no meaning.

Way too many smart people with big reputations are wrong about everything that matters. Something’s gonna happen that gives them an excuse not to have to admit they were in denial.

One of the most, if not the most, precious and rare things in the universe is the human brain. We have a cosmic obligation to use it and to confirm it works.

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