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WING MAN
NORTH BAY BOH EM I AN | JUNE 1 2-1 8 , 20 1 3 | BO H E M I AN.COM
Heinberg lives out his own principles in his modest Santa Rosa home.
Charged Up The Post Carbon Institute’s Richard Heinberg on the so-called petro-boom, the folly of fracking and the ways we can get back on track BY LEILANI CLARK
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Tod Brilliant
ichard Heinberg is surprisingly chipper for a man who, if projections by the U.S. government and global-energy analysts are to be believed, might just have seen the basis for his career virtually debunked.
The Post Carbon Institute senior fellow smiles easily in the art- and book-filled living room of the Santa Rosa home he shares with his wife, Janet, even as he talks about the implications of a fracking-fueled petro-boom from North Dakota to Pennsylvania that’s got U.S. energy executives crowing about abundant fossil-fuel-derived energy to last the next century or two. It’s a claim that directly flouts the concept of peak oil—the point at which global petroleum production goes into terminal decline—and Heinberg’s assertion that growth (as we know it) is headed into irreversible decline. Wearing a blue-checked Oxford shirt, jeans and house slippers, Heinberg’s relaxed demeanor could be due to time spent among the fruit trees and chickens in his backyard permaculture paradise. Maybe it’s the two hours of violin the self-described “violin junkie” plays each day. Or it could be the possible ace in his pocket—a February 2013 report by retired geo-scientist J. David Hughes and published by the Post Carbon Institute which claims to debunk the possibility that unconventional fuels