Worried about the Federal Debt? Then You Should Be Worried About the Natural Debt Too

I have a Going Green column on the Time.com mainpage about the similarities between the federal debt every politician in Washington claims to be worried about, and the debt to nature that almost no one is talking about. They’re remarkable similar. As a country, we’ve run up a massive federal debt in part because we’ve [...]

Why the World’s Fisheries Are Going Bankrupt

I’m in DC for the AAAS annual meeting, and while this gathering of the world’s smartest people (and the journalists who write about them) is big news in the science world, the real action is a few blocks away at the Capitol. There Democrats and Republicans are in a knife fight over the budget—and just [...]

Energy: Can We Run Out of Oil and Other Natural Resources?

Over at the New York Times, resident libertarian-contrarian John Tierney has a column about a bet he took in 2005 with the late energy analyst Matthew Simmons. Simmons—the author of Twilight in the Desert: The Coming Saudi Oil Shock and the World Economy—was a prominent believer in peak oil, the theory that we’ve reached the [...]