Energy https://www.thesunmagazine.org/rss en-us Glass Overfull leathtonino@gmail.com There has been a boom, and soon there will be a bust, in global human population. And no advanced civilization will be able to reemerge because we will have used everything up. There will be no oil and gas and other supplies of that nature to maintain any civilization that might emerge from the ashes of this one.

]]> http://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/28877 Sun, 30 Nov 2025 12:00:00 -0500 https://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/600-glass-overfull 600-4-stern-preview.jpg 600-Stern-Tonino Fuel Feeding the woodstove, siphoning gas with a hose, drinking endless cups of coffee

]]> http://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/28534 Wed, 31 Jul 2024 12:00:00 -0400 https://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/584-fuel 584-31-higginbotham-preview.jpg 584 - Higginbotham - Fuel Under Fire We’ve got changes playing out now with astounding rapidity. Biologists can see natural selection occurring over the course of a field season. . . . Studying these adaptations can help us identify the issues that are most important and the species that need the most help. This may not make us worry less, but it can help us worry smarter.

]]> http://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/26075 Sun, 31 Dec 2023 05:00:00 -0500 https://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/26075-under-fire Burning Questions A fire manager making a decision may look like they’re in a position of power, but often they really have only one choice: to suppress the fire. If they don’t, they are opening themselves up to a Russian roulette of consequences depending on how the wind blows, quite literally.

]]> http://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/22365 Tue, 31 Oct 2023 04:00:00 -0400 https://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/22365-burning-questions The Bright Green City I love the idea that there is a proper technique to living on this planet. For too long we’ve had this romantic notion that nature’s perfect, and humanity has fallen from grace, and there’s really no way to be a human being and not abuse nature. But if we view how we live on the planet as a matter of technique, we can see ourselves not as evil but as ignorant. These things are happening because of our poor choices, not because of our nature. We can make better choices. The future isn’t already written.

]]> http://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/22438 Thu, 01 Apr 2010 00:00:00 -0400 https://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/22438-the-bright-green-city October 2009 Global warming is irreversible, Lovelock says: We’ve already pushed the planet past the tipping point. Solar panels and compact fluorescents aren’t going to avert disaster. By the end of this century, he predicts, floods, droughts, violent storms, and melting polar ice caps will make most of the world uninhabitable.

]]> http://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/26009 Thu, 01 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0400 https://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/26009-october-2009 The Decline And Fall Of The Suburban Empire I hear two themes that both represent a big fantasy. One is the techno-triumphalist fantasy that assumes we’re going to invent our way out of our problems: some mythical “they” will come up with a techno-rescue — a new miracle fuel to keep the cars running, or something like that. The other fantasy assumes that we’re going to organize our way out of this mess. Both tend to ignore the likelihood that we’re going to be living in a more disorderly society with a lot of people who are unhappy and perhaps violent and who are going to be making disruptive political claims.

]]> http://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/25691 Thu, 01 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0400 https://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/25691-the-decline-and-fall-of-the-suburban-empire <em>excerpted from</em><br />Small Is Beautiful Equally, people who live in highly self-sufficient local communities are less likely to get involved in large-scale violence than people whose existence depends on worldwide systems of trade.

]]> http://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/27176 Thu, 01 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0400 https://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/27176-em-excerpted-from-em-br-small-is-beautiful Sunbeams

Nature is by and large to be found out-of-doors, a location where, it cannot be argued, there are never enough comfortable chairs.

Fran Lebowitz

]]> http://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/22406 Tue, 01 Sep 2009 16:48:00 -0400 https://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/22406-sunbeams The Sincerest Form Of Flattery Our mission, in both our business and our nonprofit, is to increase respect for the natural world. Creating more-sustainable products and processes is just an extension of that. To learn from nature, you have to become involved with what Wes Jackson calls the “deep conversation.” To learn how to take carbohydrates and water and turn them into a fiber as strong as steel, as a spider does, you go to a spider and respectfully ask, “How are you doing that?” Then you go and try to do it yourself. And when you fail — it’s very hard to do! — you go back to the organism and ask again.

]]> http://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/23711 Tue, 01 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0400 https://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/23711-the-sincerest-form-of-flattery Sunbeams

Cars today are almost the exact equivalent of the great Gothic cathedrals: I mean the supreme creation of an era, conceived with passion by unknown artists, and consumed . . . by a whole population which appropriates them as a purely magical object.

Roland Barthes

]]> http://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/22395 Wed, 01 Aug 2007 16:48:00 -0400 https://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/22395-sunbeams How Many Americans Does It Take To Change A Light Bulb? Getting back to the federal level: There is currently a suppression of politically unacceptable views on energy. For example, scientists who work on global warming are being told not to talk to the press. The Environmental Protection Agency issues an annual report on air pollutants and their impact. A few years ago, when the draft of the report included greenhouse gases — the kind that contribute to global warming — the information was pulled by the Bush administration.

]]> http://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/28050 Wed, 01 Aug 2007 00:00:00 -0400 https://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/28050-how-many-americans-does-it-take-to-change-a-light-bulb Forget What They Told You The idea that America’s a democracy is a fucking lie. We’ve had one fixed election after another. By my calculations, Hubert Humphrey beat Richard Nixon in 1968. Of course, Humphrey was a jackal as well. But what is not widely understood is that we’ve always had a system in America of not counting certain votes. My good friends on the Left are afraid that the Republicans are going to steal the next election by computer — that the software is going to allow Karl Rove to change the vote. Well, most people who worry about that are white. Black people know they’ve stolen the vote the old-fashioned way for centuries.

]]> http://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/23352 Tue, 01 May 2007 00:00:00 -0400 https://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/23352-forget-what-they-told-you Sunbeams

War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious.

Major General Smedley Butler

]]> http://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/27441 Thu, 01 Mar 2007 16:48:00 -0500 https://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/27441-sunbeams Golden http://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/27343 Thu, 01 Mar 2007 00:04:00 -0500 https://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/27343-golden Peak Experience We’re on the verge of an infrastructural shift as profound as any in human history, on the scale of the Industrial Revolution. You might say we’re going to be seeing the other side of that revolution, and it will change our political system, our ideologies, and our beliefs.

]]> http://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/24223 Sat, 01 Jul 2006 00:00:00 -0400 https://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/24223-peak-experience The Death Of Environmentalism Over the last fifteen years, environmental foundations and organizations have invested hundreds of millions of dollars in combating global warming. We have strikingly little to show for it.

]]> http://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/22525 Tue, 01 Feb 2005 00:05:00 -0500 https://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/22525-the-death-of-environmentalism Can The Left Get It Right? Progressives need to help people imagine more ambitiously what we can do together. American liberals today are stuck defending government programs that are, in some cases, more than half a century old. We need to reinvent progressive politics by reinventing a strategic role for government that unites Americans and transcends interest-group politics.

]]> http://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/26290 Tue, 01 Feb 2005 00:00:00 -0500 https://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/26290-can-the-left-get-it-right Holiday Offer http://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/21508 Sat, 01 Nov 2003 19:15:00 -0500 https://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/21508-holiday-offer The View From Here The phone rings, I answer it, and the world collapses. I’m staring into space, hearing over and over again the receptionist’s words: “The doctor wants you to come in this afternoon to discuss some lab results. . . . And bring someone with you.”

]]> http://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/23019 Sat, 01 Mar 1997 00:00:00 -0500 https://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/23019-the-view-from-here Celebrating A Massacre U.S. bomber pilots destroyed or incapacitated eighteen of Iraq’s twenty electrical power plants. The link between that and children dying today was explained by the Harvard team: “Without electricity, water cannot be purified, sewage cannot be treated, waterborne diseases flourish, and hospitals cannot cure treatable illnesses.”

]]> http://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/28154 Mon, 01 Jul 1991 00:00:00 -0400 https://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/28154-celebrating-a-massacre Nuclear Mirror It is time to go beyond the usual parameters of the nuclear debate. It is time to begin asking ourselves how The Bomb has affected the human soul itself. By exploring The Bomb as symbol, we can penetrate more deeply into the amazing mirror nuclear weapons have created. Extraordinary changes in society, in attitude and in values have emerged world-wide since Hiroshima, changes that show us a thousand ways in which The Bomb has become the guiding metaphor of our time.

]]> http://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/21613 Fri, 01 Feb 1985 00:10:00 -0500 https://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/21613-nuclear-mirror Editor’s Note http://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/23889 Thu, 01 Dec 1983 00:00:00 -0500 https://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/23889-editor-s-note Do It. Expand! Maintain the intention to be expanded.

]]> http://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/22291 Sat, 01 Aug 1981 00:00:00 -0400 https://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/22291-do-it-expand The New Nuclear Tyranny Of course a lot of people are ignorant, but geneticists and radiobiologists should know that this excessive irradiation of the population will cause a loss of vigor in the gene pool and a loss of mental ability. . . . The other overt sign is overweight Americans. The average weight has increased rather dramatically. This is a logical outcome of the presence of radioactive iodine in the average American diet having gone up.

]]> http://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/25400 Mon, 01 Dec 1980 00:00:00 -0500 https://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/25400-the-new-nuclear-tyranny Editor’s Note http://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/28079 Tue, 01 Jul 1980 02:01:00 -0400 https://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/28079-editor-s-note Nuclear Energy — I’m Against The Stuff Pretend that this is a movie. You are seeing two men create a curl of dust as they drive in a pick-up down a dirt road. The one driving is old, his features molded like leather, worn and stretched by a hard working foot.

]]> http://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/27827 Wed, 01 Aug 1979 00:25:00 -0400 https://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/27827-nuclear-energy-i-m-against-the-stuff Truth Is Stranger . . . About a week before the Three Mile Island nuclear reactor accident — strikingly similar to the incident portrayed in the new film, “The China Syndrome” — the following memo was issued by the Carolina Power and Light Company, in its newsletter “Info-Briefs.”

]]> http://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/26584 Fri, 01 Jun 1979 00:15:00 -0400 https://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/26584-truth-is-stranger “Truth” Crisis, Not “Energy” Crisis It was all blamed on the “Arab oil embargo” but who really believed that? There were the tankers, filled to the brim with oil, being kept waiting off-shore. The figures that would authenticate a “shortage” just didn’t add up. Arab oil is just a fraction of U.S. supply and is mainly controlled and pooled internationally by the U.S.-dominated world oil industry.

]]> http://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/26741 Fri, 01 Jun 1979 00:10:00 -0400 https://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/26741-truth-crisis-not-energy-crisis Another Opinion Like most spokesmen on both sides of the nuclear debate, George Wald takes the liberty of addressing only those segments of the issues that support his arguments. He employs the nuclear opponents’ tactic of couching ideas in emotional terms, as well as using the purely technical arguments preferred by the supporters of nuclear energy. Both sides are wrong in that they address themselves to the symptoms rather than the origins of the energy problem.

]]> http://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/22428 Fri, 01 Jun 1979 00:05:00 -0400 https://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/22428-another-opinion