finding resilience in uncertain times | climate, food, energy, safety, money

Giving false hope, Obama claimed several times last year that U.S. oil extraction was at an all-time high, when actually it’s in a long-term decline

After pressure from Republicans for a quick decision, the Obama administration decided to reject the proposed pipeline rather than try to rush its environmental review

If shale gas remains plentiful and cheap, it could crowd out renewable energy as well as ways of capturing carbon dioxide and storing it underground

Creating checklists can help avoid catastrophic failures in flights and surgery, and might just help with writing and generally being more resilient

In a report pushing for development of oil shale—solid deposits of kerogen that can be cooked to produce oil—the Department of Energy says the peak of conventional crude oil is near

The idea of peak oil is not that the world will soon run out of oil, but that it will, at some point, reach a maximum and then gradually decline

The planet is getting hotter and more crowded, energy supplies may soon get tighter, and yet billions of people seem to want a consumer lifestyle that's completely unsustainable. Things aren't looking good.

It seems like a long shot that we're going to somehow solve all these problems and generate enough food, fuel, and stuff to satisfy people's wants. That's why we've got to think about what to do if the world fails at this. We can fail catastrophically, or we can fail gracefully—it's up to us.

Hi, I'm Mason Inman (bio & contact), a journalist who covers climate and energy issues. I regularly write for National Geographic News, Nature Climate Change, and have a weekly column called The Climate Post. My articles are here, plus my thoughts on failing gracefully and resilience.

a chapter by Richard Heinberg from “The Post Carbon Reader”

a blog post by marketing guru Seth Godin

Chapter 5 of “Profit from the Peak” by Brian Hicks and Chris Nelder

—geologist Dan Schrag on “the most important number in the world”

—Amos Nur, professor emeritus of geophysics, Stanford University

—novelist and commentator Bruce Sterling on the state of the world in 2010