Yves Cochet
Yves Cochet was minister for territorial planning and for the environment under PM, Lionel Jospin. As a green activist for the past forty years, he has been a European MP for the European Green Party until june 2014 after spending almost twenty years as a parliamentary at the French national assembly. With a PhD in Mathematics, he also holds a teacher-researcher position at the national institute for applied sciences based in Rennes (1969-1997). His research is focused on the theory of neural networks. He has namely published “Stratégies et moyens de développement de l’éfficacité énergétique et des sources d’énergie renouvelable en France” (Documentation française 2005), “Sauver la Terre” (with Agnès Sinaï, Fayard, 2003), “Pétrole Apocalypse” (Fayard, 2005), “Antimanuel d’Ecologie” (Bréal, 2009), “Où va le Monde ?” (with Jean-Pierre Dupuy, Susan George and Serge Latouche, Mille et une Nuits, 2012).
The Next Thirty-three Years on Earth
The Green Party (Les Verts in French), the first unified political ecology organization, was created thirty-three years ago. As of today, this party’s representatives have been elected to nearly all of France’s elective offices, and all for close to nothing. From an ecological stance, the geo-bio-physical state of France – of Europe and the World […]
Preserving our Societies in the Face of the Collapse
After the collapse, will people still form societies, in the absence of governments? And, if so, how will they contain the violence internal to the group they will have formed? A substantial majority of human beings live in States, meaning a territory and population under the rule of a single political power able to define […]
Phase Transition: Three World Models
“We cannot win against entropy, but we must act as if we could”, Marc-Aurèle, (Pensées pour moi-même, p.170) and Ugo Bardi (conference, 4th of Mai 2011). It is vain to claim that we can describe the future as precisely as we can the past. Nevertheless, one of the key concerns of economic and political actors […]The Collapse: Catabolic or Catastrophic?
Let us call “the collapse” of contemporary globalised society the process at the end of which basic needs (water, food, housing, clothing, energy, mobility, and security) are no longer provided to a majority of the population by state-controlled services.
Manifesto
The Momentum Institute met for the first time on the 10th of March 2011, the day before an earthquake struck Japan and unleashed the nuclear catastrophe we know as Fukushima. The twofold catastrophe that engulfed the inhabitants of the northern part of Honshu Island was both local and global. It demonstrates the fragility of the […]
Brèves
Local Dollars, Local Sense
In response to the magnitude of the energy, environmental and economical crisis that strike the United States, the Post Carbon Institute has recently undertaken the production of a series of community resilience guides.
Post-Fukushima Food Resilience
Only 39% of calories consumed by the Japanese come from local production, the remaining 61% are imported, often from far away.Japan has one of the world’s lowest levels of food self-sufficiency.
Dennis Meadows Forty years after “The Limits to Growth”
To mark the 40th anniversary of the Club of Rome’s report , Dennis Meadows discussed the challenges of forging ahead into a sustainable future at “Perspectives on Limits to Growth: Challenges to Building a Sustainable Planet”.
Europe facing Peak Oil
Benoît Thévard, an energy engineer member of the Momentum Institute, published a study entitled ” Europe facing Peak Oil”. Peak Oil is the period of time when global oil production starts to decline due to the depletion of the exploitable resources.