The advent of fossil fuels changed the world profoundly (giving us everything from plastics and automobiles to global warming); the inevitable and rapidly approaching end of the oil-coal-and-gas era will likewise bring overwhelming transformation in its wake. My new...
The beginning of the Blue Nile near its outlet from Lake Tana in the highlands of Ethiopia. Photo by Ondrej Zvácek/Creative Commons Earlier this month, the foreign ministers of Sudan, Egypt and Ethiopia reached agreement on basic principles for managing what...
Recently I’ve been reading salvos in a raging debate about biological and ecological conservation. Traditionally, conservation has largely been about protecting “natural” environments by keeping human presence to a minimum. Now some observers have pointed out that there are...
The mission of UPSTREAM (formerly Product Policy Institute) is “sustainable production and consumption and good governance.” Sometimes I feel like we’re swimming against the tide in advocating a role for government action in ensuring sustainable production and consumption. Big...
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...
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....
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...
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...
Imagine if each tap that delivered water from the Colorado River – whether to a farm, a factory, or a home – suddenly went dry for a year. What would happen to the West’s economy? That’s pretty much the...
Post Carbon Fellow Joshua Farley was one of 45 leading scholars, authors and activists who convened at The Great Hall of Cooper Union, New York City, on October 25-26, 2014, for the public presentation: “Techno-Utopianism and the Fate of...