Kurt Cobb

Here we go again. Satellite companies that plan to put tens of thousands of satellites into orbit to create space-based internet and cellphone networks are about to reach the final frontier for human degradation of the environment, outer space. And, th...

Complex, tightly networked systems run very efficiently and can work with precision for long periods, until they don't. Money saved on the front end can be lost in one catastrophic accident. There is no better recent example than the derailment of a No...

The most recent poster child for the failure to understand resource limits is the town of Rio Verde Foothills, an unincorporated part of Maricopa County in Arizona adjacent to Scottsdale. The town's residents were blindside recently, when the City of S...

"Global warming" morphed into "climate change" which now seems inadequate to describe the weather chaos we are experiencing on planet Earth.* The recent "atmospheric rivers" which have drenched California have been a catastrophe causing an estimated $1...

Few of us think about heat as an essential ingredient in the products we use every day. And, yet industrial process heat constitutes two-thirds of all energy used by industry. It is used to melt and form metals, to make ceramics, to refine crude oil, t...