About Nicole Foss

Nicole Foss, international speaker and sustainability expert, is co-editor of The Automatic Earth, where she writes under the name Stoneleigh. She and her writing partner have been chronicling and interpreting the ongoing credit crunch as the most pressing aspect of our current multi-faceted global predicament. The Automatic Earth site integrates finance, energy, environment, psychology, population and realpolitik in order to explain why we find ourselves in a state of crisis and what we can do about it. Prior to the establishment of The Automatic Earth, Nicole was editor of The Oil Drum, a Canadian periodical, where she wrote on peak oil and finance.

Foss runs the Agri-Energy Producers’ Association of Ontario, where she has focused on farm-based biogas projects and grid connections for renewable energy. While living in the UK she was a Research Fellow at the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies, where she specialized in nuclear safety in Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union, and conducted research into electricity policy at the EU level.

Her academic qualifications include a BSc in biology from Carleton University in Canada (where she focused primarily on neuroscience and psychology), a post-graduate diploma in air and water pollution control, the common professional examination in law and an LLM in international law in development from the University of Warwick in the UK. She was granted the University Medal for the top science graduate in 1988 and the law school prize for the top law school graduate in 1997.

Here Nicole talks about the need to decouple our economy from fossil fuels if we are to survive  economic and ecological crises.