Richard Heinberg on Our Renewable Future
Richard Heinberg discusses our renewable future and how to get there. Richard is the author of eleven books including: – Afterburn (April 2015) – Snake Oil (July 2013) – The End of Growth (August 2011) – Peak Everything: Waking...
Is the US Overplaying Its Energy Hand?
In the grand poker game of geopolitics, energy is often the wild card. That’s why the Middle East is such a mess: Great Powers (first Britain, more recently the United States) have been installing, propping up, toppling, threatening, or...
The Year the Dam of Denial Breaks
This is the year the “dam of denial” will break and the momentum for climate action will become an unstoppable flood. It will be messy, confusing and endlessly debated but with historical hindsight, 2015 will be the year. The...
Climate Change Poses Existential Water Risks
We often hear it said that climate change is too abstract to win the support needed to effectively combat it. But the primary way we will experience climate change is through the water cycle – through droughts, floods, depleted...
Can We Earn a Living on a Living Planet?
It has been a tough couple of years in the effort to unite labor, community, and environmental groups, an alliance that has always been strained. The extractive energy sector—coal, gas, oil—has historically had strong union representation and well-paying jobs....
What Singapore Can Teach All Cities About Using Urban Green Infrastructure To Mitigate Megadroughts
Nanyang Technical University, Singapore. NASA’s new report on the likelihood of megadrought in the Central and Western United States is a harsh yet timely wake-up call for cities and the need for green infrastructure. It’s ironic but those taking the...
Love Water for Chocolate
As Valentine’s Day approaches, no doubt many of us have chocolate on our minds and taste buds. Delicious, dark, tempting chocolate that, eaten in moderation, may even be good for us. As we’ve learned in recent years, the cocoa...
India’s Food Security Threatened by Groundwater Depletion
The severe and ongoing depletion of underground water supplies in India poses a growing threat to the nation’s food security. Without serious efforts to stem the mining of groundwater, food production will decline, unleashing painful social and economic consequences...
Thanks, Bill.
I learned today of the passing of William Catton, author of Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change (1982), and Bottleneck: Humanity’s Impending Impasse (2009). (For a biography of Catton, see Wikipedia ). I didn’t read Overshoot until around...
Why Local Matters, and Why It’s Inevitable
Below are the transcript and slides from a very short (~5 minute) presentation I gave at a recent Confluence Philanthropy gathering. Thank you Dana for the invitation and introduction. I want to talk a little about why place-based...