I’m going to keep it simple today and simply urge you to look at the animated timeline at Climate Central: https://www.climatecentral.org/news/across-u.s.-heaviest-downpours-on-the-rise-18989

The British newspaper, The Guardian, has come under fire for launching a worldwide campaign to draw serious attention the perils of climate change. Who’s upset? Big Oil? Big Coal? If that’s what you’re thinking, you’re undoubtedly correct on both counts. But the potshots I’m referring to are coming from the journalism profession itself, those mandarins […]

In 1992 Governor Jerry Brown ran for the Democratic nomination for President. I was living in a log home on a mountain ridge in Oregon, having left NBC News several years earlier to write novels. I listened to one of the first debates of that political season on NPR. Brown was up against a number […]

Even for a collapsed Catholic like me—“lapsed” just doesn’t quite cover my retreat from the church—Pope Francis provides some encouraging moments, whether he’s championing the interests of the forgotten poor or urging people to care for the environment. I’m not going to go all gaga on him, but he’s using his powerful pulpit for some […]

Hydroelectric dams across the American West are seeing significant—sometimes precipitous—drops in energy production. This is particularly acute, of course, in California, but it’s also true in Arizona, where I came of age in the ‘60s and ‘70s. Arizona is well into its second decade of what some experts are calling a mega-drought.   Wasting water […]