As with so many things, Californians are going first where the rest of us will follow Monday morning dawned smoky across much of California, and it dawned scary – over the weekend winds as high as a hundred miles an hour had whipped wildfires through forests and subdivisions. It wasn’t the first time this
Introduction For nearly a decade I have been following the bad news on climate change and peak oil and become increasingly concerned by them. In recent years I have started to both reduce my personal carbon footprint and actively prepare for what looks like an uncertain and troubling future for us all. I have now
Here’s what passes for humor in the climate movement sometimes: emailing one of my colleagues a few months ago, in the midst of some strategic questions about a new campaign, I said oh, well, if we get it wrong it’s not like it’s the end of the…. Oh. It’s not helpful to think of
Solar power is increasingly available around the clock as energy storage become more affordable. Todd Karin was prepared when California’s largest utility shut off power to millions of people to avoid the risk of wildfires last month. He’s got rooftop solar panels connected to a single Tesla Powerwall in his rural home near Fairfield,
It depends, experts say. Just expect to make a few sacrifices. Even by the standards of the generally well-informed clean-energy customers in California's Bay Area, Todd Karin is a savvy one. Karin works as a postdoctoral researcher in the energy storage and distributed resources division at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Last year, he chose
Scientists disagree on the timeline of collapse and whether it's imminent. But can we afford to be wrong? And what comes after? “It is now too late to stop a future collapse of our societies because of climate change.” These are not the words of a tinfoil hat-donning survivalist. This is from a paper
None of us can be unaware of the debates raging about global warming and climate change, but it often seems like there's more smoke than fire. With all the arguing back and forth about emissions targets and lifestyle changes it can be easy to dismiss it all as 'too complicated' and to not know
On election night 2016, Kim Cobb, a professor at the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Georgia Tech, was on Christmas Island, the world’s largest ring-shaped coral reef atoll, about 1,300 miles south of Hawaii. A climate scientist, she was collecting coral skeletons to produce estimates of past ocean temperatures. She had been
Searching for a cure for my climate crisis grief. One day early this fall, 19 people gathered in a small event space in Red Hook, Brooklyn, and sat in a circle. They included an immigration lawyer, a therapist, an Extinction Rebellion protester, an artist and me. Outside, it was cloudlessly sunny and hot in
Creator of the ‘ecological footprint’ on life and death in a world 4 C hotter. "Carbon emissions may continue to rise, the polar ice caps may continue to melt, crop yields may continue to decline, the world’s forests may continue to burn, coastal cities may continue to sink under rising seas and droughts may