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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...