POSTED: Bob Leonard • 02.11.2020 • no comments

I ran across a music video on YouTube last night. It was produced in 1987 by an Australian band named Midnight Oil. The song (you may remember it) is “Beds Are Burning”. It resonated with me because of the recent fires in Australia. It seems eerily prescient now.   “How do we sleep while our […]

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POSTED: Bob Leonard • 02.04.2020 • no comments

Local communities come together to recover from disasters. It is human nature to help when we see others in distress. We’ve all seen it dozens of times. Strangers pitch in together and lift a car that has pinned a woman. People go door to door after a hurricane to find those who need assistance. The […]

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POSTED: Bob Leonard • 01.28.2020 • no comments

As climate change impacts become more severe, cities and communities are seeking to become more resilient. One obvious place to start is infrastructure (roads, bridges, water treatment facilities, etc.) that are designed to last fifty years or more. If we can make our investments in infrastructure resilient to the impacts of climate change, they will […]

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POSTED: Bob Leonard • 01.21.2020 • no comments

The one factor most likely to affect how well we endure a global crisis is the quality of our cooperation and collaboration. A great deal depends on whether we exhibit pro-social attitudes and responses, or we panic and blame. We must recognize that we’re all in this together. By cooperating and collaborating, we can salvage […]

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POSTED: Bob Leonard • 01.13.2020 • no comments

“Climate resilience is the ability to anticipate, prepare for, and respond to hazardous events, trends, or disturbances related to climate. Improving climate resilience involves assessing how climate change creates new, or alters current, climate-related risks. We can take steps to better cope with these risks.”1   Humanity has a lot of problems. Climate change, political […]

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POSTED: Sean Munger • 01.06.2020 • no comments

Since the recent events that have greatly escalated tensions between the United States and Iran, there’s been a lot of talk about the possibility of war. Though it’s an uncomfortable subject, it is worth examining. War and climate change are closely related in a number of ways. If a major military conflict was to break […]

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POSTED: Bob Leonard • 12.17.2019 • no comments

In the writing of “Moving to a Finite Earth Economy”, we were lucky enough to get a personal introduction to Herschel Specter, a nuclear industry veteran. Here are some highlights from his bio:   Herschel Specter, President of Micro-Utilities, Inc., holds a BS in Applied Mathematics from the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn and an MS […]

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POSTED: Jon Biemer • 12.09.2019 • no comments

Many of our efforts to reduce our impact on the Earth have limitations. We keep running into old habits, family priorities, clunky infrastructure and a sense that we just can’t get good enough.   There is an answer to this conundrum. I call it Handprint Thinking.     Decades ago, I read a book on […]

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POSTED: Bob Leonard • 12.02.2019 • no comments

In writing the Energy chapter for “Moving to a Finite Earth Economy”, we researched Nuclear and were a bit surprised at the amount of support for it as a necessary component in reaching net zero emissions. So we dug deeper and came to the conclusion that nuclear power is vital given the abbreviated time frame […]

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POSTED: Sean Munger • 11.25.2019 • no comments

We are now passing through a crucial period in the history of climate change: the fulcrum point where society’s attitudes toward it, and particularly the continued use of fossil fuels, are changing. Much has been written, here on Spaceship Earth as well as many other places, about the “Greta effect,” meaning the sudden increased public […]

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