Environmentalists have known for decades that the “greenest” form of energy available is reduction of useless and harmful energy. Over 50 years ago, the first Earth Day embodied this with “Reduce; Reuse; Recycle.” Today, that seems to have been replaced […]
Dammed Good Questions about the Green New Deal
Hydroelectric power from dams might be the thorniest issue that proponents of the Green New Deal (GND) have to grapple with. Providing more energy than solar and wind combined, dams could well become the key backup “renewable” if it otherwise […]
Thinking Outside the Grid
Thirty years ago, a friend of mine published a book called 50 Simple Things You Can Do to Save The Earth. It described the huge environmental benefits that would result if everyone made some simple adjustments to their way of […]
What is ‘Energy Denial’?
The fiftieth anniversary of the first Earth Day of 1970 will be in 2020. As environmentalism has gone mainstream during that half-century, it has forgotten its early focus and shifted toward green capitalism. Nowhere is this more apparent than abandonment […]
The 9% lie: industrial food and climate change
The Climate Emergency is finally getting the attention of the media and the U.S. (and world) body politic, as well as a growing number of politicians, activists and even U.S. farmers. This great awakening has arrived just in time, given […]
Life in a ‘degrowth’ economy, and why you might actually enjoy it
What does genuine economic progress look like? The orthodox answer is that a bigger economy is always better, but this idea is increasingly strained by the knowledge that, on a finite planet, the economy can’t grow for ever. But what […]
From Local Pants to Local Energy: The Case for Localizing Our Economies
(This article originally appeared on Truthout.org.) During a panel discussion this May on Community Choice Energy, a rapidly growing initiative in California and six other states that enables communities to seize control of local electricity services, I argued for the […]
Changing Everything
Among climate change activists, solutions usually center on a transition to renewable energy. There may be differences over whether this would be best accomplished by a carbon tax, bigger subsidies for wind and solar power, divestment from fossil fuel companies, […]
Ice Cream, Shamans, and Climate Change
In the summer of 1969, I was 18 years old with a job driving an ice cream truck in a small New England town. One July afternoon the weather was hot and humid – ideal for ice cream – but […]