Tree Teachings: How Fossil Fuels and Climate Change Are Altering the Global Forest

Aerial survey showing dead and dying trees in California, August 2016. Climate change is killing off trees in several ways. Photo by Pacific Southwest Region 5 / CC BY 2.0. The world’s most ancient trees are failing. And their demise is telling us something about the dramatic impact of climate change on the natural world, […]

Responding to Collapse, Part 2: Climate Change

Discuss this article at the Environment Table inside the Diner       These squash just climbed up and helped themselves to a seat. The title for this series of posts started out as “Preparing for collapse”, but in my last post I immediately went into a rant about how I see a hard, fast, […]

Japan announces new plan to drain radioactive Fukushima water DIRECTLY into the Pacific Ocean

(Natural News) Government authorities in Japan have announced new plans to start dumping highly radioactive wastewater from the failed Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power facility directly into the Pacific Ocean. Though the amount of radiation in the water far exceeds legally-permitted levels, according to the plant’s operator and documents reviewed by the U.K.’s Telegraph, there’s apparently […]

Total Planetary Collapse: The truth is that we are literally running out of everything

The clock is ticking for humanity, and it is not just because our financial system is heading for the biggest implosion that any of us have ever seen.  The truth is that we are literally running out of everything.  We will not have enough oil to meet our energy needs long before we get to […]

Why Permaculture Puts Food First

“Had we heeded Malthus’s warning and kept the human population to less than one billion, we would not now be facing a torrid future.“ There are seven popular food crops in this picture  When I teach permaculture, and now having done more than 50 full design courses, I try to de-emphasize gardening. I do that […]

This plastic world

Over the last 20 years, we have been led to believe that drinking bottled water is saving us from disease. This belief needs to be shattered now. Plastic bottles are amongst the many sources of microplastic particles entering our bodies. A new study has confirmed microplastics in human excretion. The reports raise alarms over how […]

The Seneca Rebound: why Growth is Faster after Collapse. Explaining the European World Dominance

  Lisbon: the monument to the European sailors who explored the world, starting with the 15th century. What made Europeans so successful in this in this task? My interpretation is that it was the result of periodic “Seneca Collapses” of the European population which made it possible to accumulate resources that would then be available […]

‘Hyperalarming’ study shows massive insect loss

Insects around the world are in a crisis, according to a small but growing number of long-term studies showing dramatic declines in invertebrate populations. A new report suggests that the problem is more widespread than scientists realized. Huge numbers of bugs have been lost in a pristine national forest in Puerto Rico, the study found, […]

The Measure of a Man in 120 Breaths

““It has been a disappointment to me that so many people, including all too many environmentalists, thought the spirit of liberation of the 1960s was and is dispensable.” — Jan Lundberg” One mark of a life well spent might be whether anyone takes a moment to write or say something publicly to note your passing. You could […]

Dissecting the science behind the oil and gas setbacks initiative

“The OEHHA chronic benzene REL considers several studies published after USEPA’s 2002 benzene assessment, which found increased efficiency of benzene metabolism at low doses, decreased peripheral blood cell counts at low doses (800−1860 μg/m3)…” It takes another 20 words — with terms like “metabolic enzymes” and “benzene detoxification” — to close out this sentence from a recent University […]

Twelve More Years To Do Nothing

“The future is changing, with or without us.“ When the latest IPCC report landed with a thud on government desks around the world, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists opined:  “There have been many climate warnings issued in the past few decades, but the latest one is more like an air-raid siren than an alarm clock […]

How Many People Have Lived on Earth?

This article is an updated version of one of the most popular features on PRB’s website, estimating the number of people who have ever been born. We first made this estimate in 1995, with updates in 2002 and 2011. “Modern” Homo sapiens (that is, people who were roughly like we are now) first walked the Earth […]

Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and other billionaires are betting on a bacteria that could change the way we grow food

An energy startup called Pivot Bio raised $70 million for its genetically modified bacteria, which help cut down on the use of nitrogen fertilizer. In addition to using up energy and polluting rivers and streams, nitrogen fertilizer releases a greenhouse gas that’s 300 times more potent than carbon dioxide. With its latest round of funding, […]

Sir David Attenborough: ‘Population growth has to come to an end’

BBC Newsnight gets to the bottom of some important issues with Sir David Attenborough starting with the ultimate question: Did he watch Love Island? BBC

U.S. government embraces climate catastrophe, but is it a ‘crisis’?

The United States government has now officially embraced climate change as a catastrophe in the making. Only it contends that the catastrophe is now inevitable no matter what humans do…and so, we should do nothing at all since whatever we do won’t matter much. That, at least, was the justification offered for freezing fuel-efficiency standards […]

Trump administration sees a 7-degree rise in global temperatures by 2100

Last month, deep in a 500-page environmental impact statement, the Trump administration made a startling assumption: On its current course, the planet will warm a disastrous seven degrees by the end of this century. A rise of seven degrees Fahrenheit, or about four degrees Celsius, compared with preindustrial levels would be catastrophic, according to scientists. […]

Monsanto’s weedkiller harms honeybees

Glyphosate – the most used pesticide ever – damages the good bacteria in honeybee guts, making them more prone to deadly infections Bees in a study marked with non-toxic paint. Photograph: Vivian Abagiu/College of Natural Sciences/UT Austin The world’s most used weedkiller damages the beneficial bacteria in the guts of honeybees and makes them more […]

Somewhere, a Tiger Yawns

“Simple, scalable, and shovel ready. China is moving negative emissions from laboratory to field trial to massive industrial scale.“ Oldest known agricultural village, Jianping China It’s no secret that The Paris Agreement, humanity’s best attempt to date to thwart our own extinction, is inadequate to the task, although it provided some mechanisms by which to […]

Did the Club of Rome Ever Disavow “The Limits to Growth”? A Story of Ordinary Disinformation

Aurelio Peccei in 1969, when he was appointed the first president of the Club of Rome The Club of Rome is inextricably linked to the legendary report that it commissioned to a group of MIT researchers in 1972, “The Limits to Growth.” Today, nearly 50 years later, we still have to come to terms with […]

The spiralling environmental cost of our lithium battery addiction

As the world scrambles to replace fossil fuels with clean energy, the environmental impact of finding all the lithium required could become a major issue in its own right Here’s a thoroughly modern riddle: what links the battery in your smartphone with a dead yak floating down a Tibetan river? The answer is lithium – […]

Overpopulation and Its Effects

Overpopulation reigns as one of the most eminent dangers facing mankind today; and conveniently remains tremendously overlooked. Most people can acknowledge the threats of global warming, the lack of food and clean drinking water, the epidemic of nearly 6,000 new children being placed in orphanages each day in the United States alone; sadly, more than […]

Duke Energy says dam breached at North Carolina plant and coal ash may be flowing into Cape Fear River

Floodwaters on Friday breached a dam that contains a man-made lake connected to a Duke Energy power plant in North Carolina, possibly causing coal ash to flow into the nearby Cape Fear River, the company said. The floodwaters flowed from Cape Fear River into the northern side of Sutton Lake, an 1,100-acre reservoir built in […]

Heinberg: What Will it Take to Avert Collapse?

  A lot of people are asking the question these days—including serious folks who work full-time on climate and energy policy. How can the world’s nations reduce greenhouse gas emissions fast enough to forestall climate catastrophe, without undermining either the global economy (which is still 85 percent dependent on fossil fuels) or the hopes of […]

Plastic Pollution: The Age of Unsolvable Problems

  Suddenly, we discovered that plastic pollution is a problem, a big one. What to do about it? As usual, it is a question of governance: the problem in itself is not so terribly bad that it couldn’t be controlled. But, over the years, we develop such effective technologies of anti-governance that we have entered […]

Why Growth Can’t Be Green

Warnings about ecological breakdown have become ubiquitous. Over the past few years, major newspapers, including the Guardian and the New York Times, have carried alarming stories on soil depletion, deforestation, and the collapse of fish stocks and insect populations. These crises are being driven by global economic growth, and its accompanying consumption, which is destroying […]

This is how the world ends: will we soon see category 6 hurricanes?

There is no such thing as a category 6 hurricane or tropical storm – yet. The highest level – the top of the scale for the most powerful, most devastating hurricane or tropical storm capable of destroying entire cities like New Orleans or New York – is a category 5 storm. Meteorologists and scientists never […]

Nuclear Power Plants At Risk Of Direct Hit By Hurricane Florence

North and South Carolina nuclear power plants are in line for a possible direct hit from Hurricane Florence. According to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), there are twelve operating nuclear power plants in the Carolinas that make electricity by the continuous splitting of uranium atoms (i.e., a nuclear reaction). These plants generally reside near a […]

The Water Crises Aren’t Coming—They’re Here

Sean Freeman I. All the Water There Is Here’s a concept: paper water. Paper water is water the government grants certain farmers who are drawing water from a river or a watershed in, say, California. The phrase describes the water the farmer, under premium conditions, is entitled to. Practically, however, paper water is mostly notional […]

US Oil and Gas Methane Emissions 60% Higher than Previously Thought

The U.S. oil and gas industry emits 13 million metric tons of the potent greenhouse gas methane from its operations each year, 60 percent more than estimated by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, according to a new study published today in the journal Science. Significantly, researchers found most of the emissions came from leaks, equipment […]

Richard Heinberg: Human Predators, Human Prey

Society as Ecosystem in a Time of Collapse, Part II This is part 2 of my 3-part essay that uses predation as a metaphor to unpack power relations in human societies. For part 1 see here. 4. Our current context: the adaptive cycle, conservation, and release As we’ve seen, predator-prey relationships shape the flow of […]

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