The Cold War Was Very Weird

The Cold War was a political magnet that clearly distorted U.S. energy policy…
And that’s as good an excuse as any to post this incredible card of a very angry Santa Father Frost (see comments) unleashing a bag full of Soviet whoop-ass on some enemies.
Unfortunately, there’s no context for the post card.
Via @Colin_Peters

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When The Whole World Needs To Be Quarantined: Fantasy Architecture and Nuclear War

In poking around the Atomic Energy Commission’s technical reports archive, you come across some stupendous documents about how the world was going to deal with nuclear war. The marriage of the bureaucratic of the apocalyptic produces deranged offspring with very detailed models.
One 1960 Atomic Energy Commission report on a prospective 100-person post-apocalyptic “Group Shelter” is [...]

Chinese Power Generation Growth 2002-2008

The non-2008 growth rates are why people like Michael Shellenberger tell a certain tech magazine things like, “”If China burns all the coal that it is set to burn between now and 2050, we are super-deeply fucked.” The 2008 growth rate is why people like the environmental economist, Alan Randall, say things like, [...]

Our Plundered Planet and Ecoapocaltyptophilia

Fairfield Osborn’s Our Plundered Planet is a scathing critique of humans relationship with Nature written in 1947. It strikes me as remarkably in-tune with early-21st century ecoapocalyptophilia.
Osborn beat the rest of us to talking about the world’s new human-centered geological era by a good four decades.  The third chapter of his book is titled, “The [...]

11th Hour Deja Vu

Sometimes, like say when you’re watching the Leonardo DiCaprio/worldsaving vehicle 11th Hour, you might get the feeling that no one really saw global energy problems and ecological disasters coming. Like everyone in the 1940s was just wearing a fedora, talking like Humphrey Bogart, and happily eating coal for breakfast.
But it didn’t happen like that. There [...]