Richard Heinberg of the Post Carbon Institute sent this out on Thursday. It’s from a book he has coming out in September, Power: Limits and Prospects for Human Survival. (Click on More … for the whole excerpt.) — MCM

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‘Understanding Power’ / By Richard Heinberg 

Homo sapiens is Earth’s unequivocal champion at gaining and wielding power. We shoot probes to other planets and plumb the depths of the seas. Each year our species extracts and processes 100 billion tons of natural resources that end up as consumer products and building materials. In order to obtain these resources, we move more soil and rock than are displaced by all of nature’s forces combined—including wind, rivers, rain, volcanoes, and earthquakes. We do so much mining, transporting, manufacturing, and waste dumping that, purely as a side effect, we’re also significantly and perilously altering the chemistry of our planet’s atmosphere and oceans. That’s power. More …