“Houston, we have a problem”  – James Lovell, Apollo 13 “Work the problem people, work the problem”  Gene Krause, Mission Control Apollo 13   Hurricane Harvey was a huge disaster.  More than 60 people lost their lives.  There is and will be hundreds of billions of dollars in damages and lost business.  My deepest sympathies […]

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.

It was about 10 years ago that I started to write about electric cars in this space with this and this column.  It was clear to me then that, ultimately, they would become mainstream and become a significant percentage of cars driven in the developed countries of the world.  In early 2008, I forecast that 2010-2015 would be the dawn of the age of the electric car and of course it was.

Sea level rise is about to become the phenomenon that will awaken humanity.  Awaken humanity to the absolute, no debate reality that we are the single largest cause of climate change.Climate change is not about “saving the planet” but about “saving ourselves from ourselves”.  The planet will go on for another several billion years.  Humanity might not make it out of this millennium.

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 […]

During the eleven plus years I have been writing this blog, the subject of energy, energy costs, and the transformation taking place in the area has been a frequent topic. Energy certainly affects the global economy. It also profoundly affects Climate Change. The major transformation under way from fossil fuels to alternative and renewable energy […]

  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 […]

The title of this column comes from a column my good friend, co-author of “This Spaceship Earth” and co-founder of ThisSpaceshipEarth.Org Tim Rumage. His column was “Physics is Not Political”. Well worth the quick read. That column came to mind two weeks ago when a very special event occurred. The Wise Elders of the Republican […]