Meta-foundation

Founded in 2003, Post Carbon Institute is leading the transition to a more resilient, equitable, and sustainable world. Post Carbon Institute provides individuals, communities, businesses, and governments with the resources needed to understand and respond to the interrelated economic, energy, environmental, and equity crises that define the 21st century. We envision a world of resilient communities and re-localized economies that thrive within ecological bounds.

Post Carbon Institute integrates and connects high-level thinking with on-the-ground action. We bring together the best ideas and models for transitioning from the carbon-addicted world to the post-carbon world as quickly, equitably, and sustainably as possible. We implement our broad strategies — Setting the Agenda, Changing the Conversation, and Building Resilience — through the mutually reinforcing projects.

Setting the Agenda
Daunting, interrelated challenges—runaway climate change, depleting natural resources, a contracting growth-dependent economy, and a widening gap between the haves and have-nots—are growing at a rate faster than our ability to solve them using traditional approaches. In conjunction with 30 Fellows and broad set of partners, PCI is helping individuals, families, communities, and thought leaders make sense of this rapidly changing reality, develop appropriate responses, and build their capacities to act. Our focusing question is simple yet profoundly vital: How can we build a more resilient society?

We define and diagnose the 21st century's energy, environment, economy, and equity challenges. PCI publishes books, reports, articles, commentaries, and blog posts that build awareness, challenge misconceptions, promote promising models, and inspire action. We're promoting a new and inspiring agenda by providing both an in-depth understanding of the challenges, and an integrated roadmap for transitioning to a promising future.

Changing the Conversation
For the most part, the national conversation on our economic crisis—with increasing desperation—focuses on “getting back to normal": robust economic growth, profligate energy use, unbridled consumerism, etc. Not only is this impossible, but the constant repetition of the same ideas sets up a dynamic where all but the most ardent environmentalists and alternative economists compete in an unwinnable debate, trying to prove that sustainable means a future “just like the present; only more so."

PCI provides new ways to understand and respond—through game-changing books, award-winning videos, hard-hitting reports, and trend-setting social media. We're helping to shift the public dialogue toward a common sense understanding of the practical limits of resources, the environment, and the economy, and a meaningful exchange of ideas for how best to respond. We're bringing furtive whispers about resource constraints, the end of economic growth, and the need to live within Nature's budget of renewable resources out into the open. We're replacing the debate about growing faster with a meaningful exchange of ideas about transitioning effectively to living with limits.

Building Resilience
PCI believes the future resides in resilient communities. Resilient, because the complex challenges we face require not solutions to make problems go away, but responses that recognize our vulnerabilities, build our capacities, and enable us to adapt to an increasingly unpredictable future. Communities, because the future is grounded in local relationships: among families and neighbors, respecting the ecological resources that sustain us, and through the institutions with which we govern ourselves.

PCI offers concrete, tangible resources that help individuals and communities grow their resilience, take appropriate action, and build a more resilient, equitable, and sustainable future…for all.

All of Post Carbon Institute's projects begin with carefully researched, evidence-based projections of the likely outcomes of economic, energy, environmental, and social trends. We share this information with thought leaders and allies, and translate it into actionable advice for communities building their resilience. We then develop projects that support the transition to a society that can thrive in a more resilient, equitable, and sustainable future…for all.

Energy Reality Campaign
Working with environmental and energy groups, advocates, and thought leaders from across the spectrum, the Energy Reality Campaign is creating a systemic understanding of the interrelationships between energy, the economy, and the natural world. PCI is collaborating with Foundation for Deep Ecology and other allies to engage environmental and political leaders — and through them, their constituencies. We offer activists the tools to build energy literacy, and create a more systemic understanding of the interrelationships among energy, the economy, and the natural world. This, in turn, is shifting the public conversation from wanting more to needing less, and valuing what we have.

Visit energy-reality.org

Community Resilience Initiative
Post Carbon Institute is bringing the best local resilience-building ideas and models to thousands of communities tackling complex environmental, economic, energy, and social challenges. Recognizing that communities are the key to effective change, PCI offers a robust resource platform, resilience.org, publications like our Community Resilience Guides, and multimedia that bring the best ideas and models for relocalizing economies and building a sustainable future.

Visit resilience.org

Busting the Shale Bubble Hype
As PCI's comprehensive analysis and activist tools demonstrate, the so-called shale revolution is simply a bubble, inflated by record levels of drilling, speculative leasing and flipping, fee-driven promotion by investment banks, and unsustainably low natural gas prices. Post Carbon Institute, Energy Policy Forum, and Earthworks have teamed up to equip environmentalists with a powerful and unassailable argument against extreme energy projects:

Fracking and other unconventional drilling efforts will not yield cheaper energy, more jobs, or a stronger economy in the long-term.

Visit shalebubble.org

See: http://www.postcarbon.org/impact_timeline/