My new book Abolish Oil Now! just came out a few days ago. I've been working on it for two years, so I'm glad that it has come out in time for the COP26 United Nations Climate Change conference in Glasgow, Scotland, starting at the end of October. This is the 26th year that leaders of the world's nations have met to avert the threat of runaway climate disruption. And despite … [Read more...]
No Better Chance than Covid to Read ‘The Plague’ by Camus
Is The Plague the greatest novel of the second half of the twentieth century? I'm not sure, but the 1947 existentialist classic by Albert Camus is entertaining and powerfully written. And these days, it's got special appeal, which is why sales of the book have skyrocketed since the pandemic hit. Camus Knew What Environmentalists Ignore Environmentalists have claimed … [Read more...]
Hurricane Harvey, We Yawn in your Direction
And Irma, we don't really give a crap about you, either. Water, Water, Everywhere Twenty-seven TRILLION gallons of water dumped on Southeast Texas in six days? That's what the various reports say. And we say, "Big whoop!" Wild-Westy, pavement-obsessedy Houston essentially destroyed, molded, and steeped in a toxic stew from chemical plants gone kablooey while the … [Read more...]
Jill Stein’s Ridiculous Run
I share many of Green Party Presidential Nominee Jill Stein's values. On climate and energy, I absolutely agree that our world is in crisis and that we need some form of a "Green New Deal," though whether that would be her plan, or some other approach, is, for me, still a point of debate. On her view that an energy transition would have multiple cost-saving and health … [Read more...]
A Lesson from the Holocaust for the Era of the Sixth Extinction
This article is the first in a two-part series. My mother didn’t die when so many others did – and that means she lived to give birth to me. I write about this now, because it has everything to do with today, even though the cataclysm in which so many perished happened more than 75 years ago. I owe my life, in part, to people who were willing to risk theirs, whose names I … [Read more...]