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Coal-Fired Power On the Way Out?
The past two years have witnessed the emergence of a powerful movement opposing the construction of new coal-fired power plants in the United States. Initially led by environmental groups, both...
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China's Changing Economy
In Plan B 4.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization, I have presented a plan to dramatically reduce carbon emissions by increasing energy efficiency and replacing fossil fuels with renewable energy. In the...
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Lowering Income Taxes While Raising Pollution Taxes Reaps Great Returns
As economic decision-makers--whether consumers, corporate planners, government policymakers, or investment bankers--we all
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Saving Civilization is Not a Spectator Sport
Given the enormous environmental and social challenges faced by our early twenty-first century global civilization, one of the questions I hear most frequently is, What can I do? People often expect...
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Reduce, Replant, and Recycle - Data Highlights on Restoring the World's Forests
The world's forests, which cover a third of Earth's land area, provide us with many essential services. They absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and give us oxygen, limit soil erosion, aid in...
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Reclaim the Streets, Put the Brakes on Car Traffic
Cars promise mobility, and in a largely rural setting they provide it. But in an urbanizing world, where more than half of us live in cities, there is an inherent conflict between the automobile and...
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Cars and People Compete for Grain
At a time when excessive pressures on the earth's land and water resources are of growing concern, there is a massive new demand emerging for cropland to produce fuel for cars--one that threatens...
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Raising Water Productivity to Increase Food Security
With water shortages constraining food production growth, the world needs an effort to raise water productivity similar to the one that nearly tripled land productivity over the last half-century....
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The Welcome Return of the Bicycle
The bicycle has many attractions as a form of personal transportation. It alleviates congestion, lowers air pollution, reduces obesity, increases physical fitness, does not emit climate-disrupting...
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The Emerging Politics of Food Scarcity
A dangerous geopolitics of food scarcity is emerging in which individual countries, acting in their narrowly defined self-interest, reinforce the trends causing global food security to deteriorate....
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Appliance Efficiency is an Easy Win for Consumers and the Climate
There are enormous opportunities to use energy more efficiently. Investing in energy efficiency is often far cheaper than expanding the energy supply to meet growing demand. Efficiency investments...
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Rising Temperatures, Rising Food Prices
Around midnight on Wednesday, August 11th, a group of commodity analysts will gather at a meeting site in the massive South Building of the U.S. Department of Agriculture in Washington, DC. Once they...
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Making the Global Shift to Renewable Energy
As fossil fuel prices rise, as oil insecurity deepens, and as concerns about climate change cast a shadow over the future of coal, a new energy economy is emerging. The old energy economy, fueled by...
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Tapping the Energy Below the Earth's Surface
The heat in the upper six miles of the earth's crust contains 50,000 times as much energy as found in all the world's oil and gas reserves combined. Despite this abundance, only 10,700 megawatts of...
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The Growing Potential and Rooted Limitations of Biofuels
As oil and natural gas reserves are being depleted, the world's attention is increasingly turning to plant-based energy sources. These include food crops, forest industry byproducts, sugar industry...
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Civilization's Steadily Eroding Foundation
The thin layer of topsoil that covers the planet's land surface is the foundation of civilization. This soil, typically 6 inches or so deep, was formed over long stretches of geological time as new...
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The Global Battle to Conserve and Rebuild Soil
The literature on soil erosion contains countless references to the "loss of protective vegetation." Over the last half-century, clearcutting, overgrazing, and overplowing have removed so much of that...
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How to Improve Food Security by Reducing Grain Demand
After several decades of Lrapid rise in world grain yields, it is now becoming more difficult to raise land productivity fast enough to keep up with the demands of a growing, increasingly affluent,...
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Future at Risk on a Hotter Planet
We are entering a new era, one of rapid and often unpredictable climate change. In fact, the new climate norm is change. The 25 warmest years on record have come since 1980. And the 10 warmest years...
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Is the World One Poor Harvest Away From Chaos?
In early January, the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) reported that its Food Price Index had reached an all-time high in December, exceeding the previous record set during the 2007-08
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