The following is Richard Heinberg’s contribution to a two-way discussion with Adam Dorr , an environmental social scientist at the nonprofit think tank Rethinkx . The exchange was hosted by Pairagraph , a platform for written dialogue between pairs of notable individuals. For the entire exchange, click here . When humanity started using fossil fuels, it gained access to tens of millions of years’ worth of stored sunlight. The result was a Great Acceleration of everything we had been doing—including growing food and harvesting renewable and nonrenewable resources from the natural world and turning them into technology, products, and waste. Our population grew eight-fold (from one billion to nearly eight billion) in a mere two centuries. But then the consequences appeared: climate change, resource depletion, soil erosion and salinization, species extinctions, plastic pollution, and more. It’s tempting to think of these as mere technical glitches that we can solve […]