It turns out carbon emissions are far more damaging than we thought. — You might think that climate change is causing temperatures to rise. However, a recent study has shown this isn’t the case. You see, the increased levels of carbon dioxide generated by humanity's rampant use of fossil fuels, is causing the upper layers of our atmosphere to rapidly cool. This might…

What It’s Going to Feel Like as the Planet Turns Against Us — In the age we’ve entered, the age of extinction, what is life going to be like? One way to think about it is what I’ve begun to call in my head “World War P.” It’s going to seem as if the planet is at war…with us. Human beings took their…

Minerals are also non-renewable resources — One of the few pieces of ‘capital’ an ordinary human owns is a car. Given the planet-fuckery that capitalism has become, this is the most obvious thing to ‘fix’. Today we are relentlessly advertised electric vehicles as a solution, a transition that lets us have our cake and eat it…

It’s just as selfish and arrogant. — I never thought I would say this, but someone finally got under my skin worse than the climate deniers. It was a woman who lectured me for making a simple list of things ordinary people could do to help live more sustainably. There was nothing brilliant about it. That was…

Food is the foundation of civilized society. As long as there’s enough food to go around, people are great at cooperating and will often work together to help the less fortunate. But when the food is gone, all bets are off. Considering how vital food is, you would think the…

The path to build a healing world in the shell of the unhealed — My favorite place in town is a Superfund site. Last summer, I’d ride my bike past it all the time, surprised to see such a large open stretch of field and trees in a rapidly-gentrifying neighborhood in a town with a dire housing crisis. The gate on the chain link…

We’re not wired that way — “The planet is dying! Society is about to collapse!” You hear these words, you might even read some compelling studies, charts, and projections. “We’re going to run out of water! We’re going to lose our coastal cities and low-lying countries to sea level rise! Millions will die in scorching heatwaves…

It’s the wrong message. “Forecasting Armageddon has become trendy of late, with a great deal of attention being given to an interpretation of the Mayan Calendar suggesting that Mother Earth is destined for doom in December of 2012.” — Seth Shostak Let’s see if we can have a thoughtful discussion…

What a textbook shows about peak everything — Fossil fuels are—by popular definition—not renewable. We don’t have 100 million years and 100 trillion plants to bury solar energy in liquid batteries under solid rock. Fossil fuels were a one-time inheritance from our dead ancestors, and we’ve blown them all in a few generations, on coke and Ferraris. It…

“The Edge… There is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over. The others-the living-are those who pushed their control as far as they felt they could handle it, and then pulled back, or slowed…

A review of a seminal collapse textbook — Energy and Human Ambition on a Finite Planet is a fantastic (and free) textbook. It teaches physics in the most fascinating way, describing how, precisely, we’re fucked. I’ll get to how fossil fuels are bad, but for now I’ll talk about how they’re good.

(title stolen from Chip Conrad’s book of the same name) A physical educator from the early years of the 1900s named Georges Hebert said, “…early gymnastics and calisthenics prioritized practical skills, with effective applications to the real world: running, jumping, balancing, crawling, climbing, lifting and carrying, throwing and catching, swimming…

When we blotted out the stars — Our ancestors understood the universe much better than us. They simply saw it more. Modern technology has completely whited out the night sky. Satellites and background interference are making observatories on Earth useless. We might have the exact gas composition of the universe written down somewhere, but we can’t see…

When I was a child, my parents convinced me that we were living in “the last days”. They were evangelical Christians, and they told me that Biblical prophecies were being fulfilled all over the place: Wars, rumors of wars, famines, earthquakes, false prophets, moral decay, all that end times stuff…

On dehumanization, disaster and who we don’t save — There is a famous (perhaps infamous) quote from Canadian environmental activist Paul Watson that reads like this: “If you want to know where you would have stood on slavery before the Civil War, don’t look at where you stand on slavery today. Look at where you stand on animal rights.” …

I know a fair number of people who are stocking up for the end times. They have cans of beans and lots of guns and bullets. One you-tuber consistently prattles on about his guns and how he hopes to be able to buy an AR-15 in the near future. A…

Go ahead and click your heels together. You know you want to. Put on a dress if it helps. Close your eyes and repeat over and over again until you get it. “There’s no place to go. There’s no place to go. There’s no place to go.” Abandoning the idea…

The free press isn’t as free as the name suggests — By 2040 snow in the UK will be a thing of the past. By 2050, London will feel like Barcelona, Madrid will feel like Marrakech, Milan will feel like Texas, Dallas. Compare these impacts of climate change to the fact that by 2050 the risk of global droughts, which currently…

This is the Year We’re Supposed to Pretend Everything’s Back to Normal. But Is It? — Is it just me, or there’s a distinctly…strange…vibe…in the air at the beginning of this new year? I didn’t know quite what to call it, until my lovely wife summed it up concisely. “We’re all,” she said, matter-of-factly, “pretending that everything’s going back to normal.” Ahhh. …

It’s ain’t gonna save us — If you pick up a popular science book it’s all about wonder and discovery and a bit of woe about the state of the world, but that’s what science says, not what it does. In the western delusion of words over actions, science is portrayed as a hero in the…