Post Carbon Institute – transitioning to a more equitable and sustainable world

Leading the transition to a more resilient, equitable, and sustainable world.

Our Mission

Founded in 2003, Post Carbon Institute’s mission is to lead the transition to a more resilient, equitable, and sustainable world by providing individuals and communities with the resources needed to understand and respond to the interrelated ecological, economic, energy, and equity crises of the 21st century.

Post Carbon Institute is doing the most important work imaginable, and doing it well.

–Bill McKibben, Author, Founder of 350.org & PCI Fellow

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Our Vision

We envision a world of resilient communities and re-localized economies that thrive within ecological bounds.

The Issues We Address

We believe that the world is experiencing the confluence of crisis in four interrelated systems — energy, ecology, economy, and equity — which we call E⁴. These crises can be summarized as:

• The age of extreme energy. Declines in the amount of affordable energy available to society mean far higher environmental, economic, and social costs.
• Overshoot abounds. Across the board—food, population, water, biodiversity, climate change, etc.—we are hitting biophysical limits.
• The end of growth. As a result of the limits within and outside the economic system, we are experiencing the end of economic growth as we’ve known it.
• Increasing inequality. Rising domestic and global inequality could lead to tremendous socio-political unrest (and ultimately economic and environmental disaster), as a growing population struggles to share diminishing economic and natural resources.