We need to Save Ourselves from Ourselves

Earth Overshoot Day was August 2, the earliest Earth Overshoot Day ever. This is the day when humanity’s consumption of natural resources officially passes the planet’s ability to replenish then in one year.

If humanity lived sustainably on Earth, then Earth Overshoot Day would be at midnight December 31, meaning we would not have consumed more than the finite resources the planet provides for us.  This is why the metaphor of Earth as a spaceship is the highest and best way to think about any aspect of climate change, sustainability, energy use and anything relative to the only place we have to live.

There will be more change in the next 20 years than any 20-50 year period in history. In fact, future historians may well look back on this time as a historical transit as significant as the beginning of the Industrial Revolution or the Renaissance. It is hard to imagine any area of life that will […]

[Note: Many of you know that after doing two years of research on my 7th book “This Spaceship Earth” I took much of 2016 off to co-found and launch a global non-profit https://thisspaceshipearth.org/ Please see a time sensitive request at the bottom of this column for the non-profit. Thank you!]  April 2009 “Water-access to, use […]

  In some odd way I am an oil price geek. In 2006, when I was starting this blog and starting to speak full time about the future, I made a forecast that oil would get to $125 a barrel price in 2008. At the time it was trading around $70 a barrel, which was […]

Last week Nature magazine published findings about a red dwarf sun – Trappist-1- that has seven Earth like planets orbiting it. This is nothing less than a major step forward in answering the question about whether there is intelligent life elsewhere in the Cosmos. It is hard to imagine a more widely wondered question than […]

In the more than 10 years I have been writing this blog, I have never asked for a favor, nor really promoted anything as that is not what this column is or should be about. That said, I am asking for a favor, and an immediate one at that. Six months ago I co-founded a […]

Climate Change is real. It is happening and it is accelerating. There are many obvious indicators to see for anyone not holding a contrived political filter, those that still live in the rapidly eroding state of denial. Sea level rise can now be seen in the present, not imagined decades down the line. Entire new […]

In March in this space I wrote a column called “A Major Energy Transition Has Begun”. The key point was my forecast that: “We are at the very beginning of the end of the fossil fuel era. The use of fossil fuels will continue for decades but 2015-2017 will be looked back upon as the […]

For four days the entire electrical usage of a European country came from renewable energy sources. More on that in a few paragraphs. The thoughts we think and the reality we live in shapes what we think is possible. Time after time barriers are broken that were thought to be impossible. A great example is […]