Many people think that we followed the buffalo, when in fact the buffalo followed us. I seem unable to explain to some of my critics why I cling to natural solutions over high-tech inventions like artificial trees, nuclear energy, and AI. …

Edward Teller still has avatars in the game. In his farewell address, Dwight D. Eisenhower warned of the “military-industrial-congressional complex” where one hand fed the other in a vicious cycle of self-aggrandizement at public expense. …

Unfracking is a method of plugging orphan wells using biochar. [Jimmy Carter] had foresight in calling for renewable energy to make up 20% of the nation’s energy mix by 2000 — a target the US still hasn’t met but is finally getting close to. Shortly before he left office, Carter’s…

How much steel and copper is needed to grow a forest? — Last week in Gaia’s Way Out we looked at natural trees in comparison to artificial trees in their ability to pull carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and restore climate balance before we all go extinct. Advocates for artificial trees, known to climate wonks and tech industrialists as Direct Air Capture…

Gaia is no dummy. She is in the process of shifting from supporting humanity to killing it off. — I’ve never completed writing a book without offering a positive solution. Granted, those are sometimes long shots. Some may even be futile. But we don’t know unless we try and if we don’t try then we make the outcome certain in a negative direction. Just to recap the predicament, in…

ESG, they are coming for you For a few decades in my youth, I pursued a career as a public interest attorney. To my clients this service was free, but lawsuits can be expensive so as much time was spent on fundraising as writing briefs or arguing in court. Occasionally…

What if the transition to renewables fails? Last week we continued our multi-week review of the study by Hansen et al, Global Warming in the Pipeline, forecasting the course of climate change this century and added two other recent compendia of studies, both of which had concluded, ominously, that the…

Can we build out renewable energy fast enough to avoid some nasty tipping points? In my two previous posts, I looked at two aspects of the Hansen et al pre-print, Global Warming in the Pipeline, forecasting the course of climate change this century from paleoclimate record and atmospheric aerosols. I…

No one has solved the McPherson Paradox because it cannot be hacked. The only solution is doing something completely counterintuitive. In 1970, while I was busy moving into an artist’s loft in Noho, James Hansen was returning to Columbia University, on the upper East Side, from a six-month sabbatical in…