When I was a kid, I was creepily fascinated by the wrongheaded idea, current in my grade school, that your hair and your fingernails kept growing after you died. The lesson seemed to be that it was hard to...
Climate change may be the biggest threat facing humanity, but the way we’re currently going about fighting it just ensures that, even if we prevail, another threat will follow, and another, and another. To explain why, it’s helpful to...
On a cool November Sunday the hall of the Little Lake Grange in Willits, CA, filled with members and supporters of WELL – Willits Economic Localization. 11 years earlier many of them had come to hear Richard Heinberg after...
Presentation to the American Geophysical Union fall meeting, December 17, 2015, San Francisco; Union Session on “Is Peak Oil Dead and What Does It Mean for Climate Change?” To view a video of this talk follow the instructions at...
COP21 in Paris is over. Now it’s back to the hard work of fighting for, and implementing, the energy transition. We all know that the transition away from fossil fuels is key to maintaining a livable planet. Several...
As much as world leaders would like to focus attention on their economies, terrorism, or winning the next election, the heat is rising. Each new release of data on melting glaciers and extreme weather seems more dire than the...
Today was the most thought-provoking day, at times viscerally so. The logo for COP21 says ‘Tous ensemble pour le climat’, or “all together for the climate” (see right). Yet today was a day when the battle lines felt clearly...
I have to confess a certain reluctance in sharing my views about the Paris climate talks, knowing as I do that it’s all too easy to judge from a distance while so many wonderful, dedicated colleagues are in Paris...
As a child of the 1950s I grew up immersed in a near-universal expectation of progress. Everybody expected a shiny new future; the only thing that might have prevented us from having it was nuclear war, and thankfully that...
The key passage — the forward-looking passage — of President Obama’s speech last week rejecting the Keystone XL pipeline came right at the end, after he rehashed all the arguments about jobs and gas prices that had been litigated...