Oil depletion and climate change will create an entirely new context in which political struggles will be played out. Within that context, it is not just freedom, democracy, and equality that are at stake, but the survival of billions of humans and of whole ecosystems.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the urgent need to address climate change and resource depletion, as these issues will reshape political dynamics and threaten human survival and ecosystems.
Richard Heinberg highlights the profound impact that oil depletion and climate change will have on the political landscape, suggesting that these environmental crises extend beyond traditional issues like freedom and democracy. Instead, they pose existential threats that could endanger the survival of millions of people and entire ecosystems, thus transforming the nature of political struggles in a world increasingly marked by resource scarcity and ecological challenges.
In practice
During a speech on environmental policy, one might use this quote to underscore the importance of proactive measures in addressing climate change.
If we do nothing, we still get to a post-carbon future, but it will be bleak. However, if we plan the transition, we can have a world that supports robust communities of healthy, creative people and ecosystems with millions of other species.
The industrial civilisation is based on the consumption of energy resources that are inherently limited in quantity and that are about to become scarce. When they do, competition for what remains will trigger dramatic economic and geopolitical events; in the end, it may be impossible for even a single nation to sustain industrialism as we have know it in the twentieth century.
You remake yourself as you grow and as the world changes. Your identity doesn’t get found. It emerges.
The future is not something we enter. The future is something we create.
I realized that if what we call human nature can be changed, then absolutely anything is possible. From that moment my life changed.
While I understand the passions and the anger that arise over the death of Michael Brown, giving into that anger by looting or carrying guns, and even attacking the police, only serves to raise tensions and stir chaos.
The injury that ended my time in football turned out to be serendipitous. I tore my Achilles while training for a pending tryout with the New York Giants, and when it snapped, so did my career, basically. That's what led me to gain the confidence to get into the acting world on my own terms.
It's very hard to stop doing things you're used to doing. You almost have to dismantle yourself and scatter it all around and then put a blindfold on and put it back together so that you avoid old habits.
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