As fossil fuel prices rise, as oil insecurity deepens, and as concerns about climate change cast a shadow over the future of coal, a new energy economy is emerging in the United States. The old energy economy, fueled by oil, coal, and natural gas, is being replaced by one powered by wind, solar, and geothermal energy. The transition is moving at a pace and on a scale that we could not have imagined even a year ago. Consider Texas. Long the leading oil-producing state, it is now also the leading generator of electricity from wind, having overtaken California two years …

This essay is adapted from Eco-Economy: Building an Economy for the Earth. You can download the book for free or order a hard copy from the Earth Policy Institute. In 1543, Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus published "On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres," in which he challenged the view that the sun revolved around the Earth, arguing instead that the Earth revolved around the sun. With his new model of the solar system, he began a wide-ranging debate among scientists, theologians, and others. His alternative to the earlier Ptolemaic model, which placed the Earth at the center of the universe, …

Some years ago, well before many outside Denmark knew Bjorn Lomborg's name, a group of his fellow faculty members at the University of Aarhus took the unusual step of developing a website specifically to warn the scientific community and others about flaws in his work. Appalled by Lomborg's scientific pretensions and unfounded conclusions, these faculty members, including a former head of the Danish Academy of Sciences, actively disassociated themselves from him. These faculty members did not want to be associated with Lomborg's work because it is fundamentally flawed. The thesis of Lomborg's book, The Skeptical Environmentalist, is that the environmental …

If you aren't normally fascinated by China's agricultural problems, then an obscure report issued this summer on the state of the nation's water supply might have struck you as rather dry. But in this case, dry is precisely the problem: The water table under the North China Plain, which produces over half of China's wheat and a third of its corn, is falling at an alarming rate. A Chinese farmer at work.Photo: ArtToday. The study, conducted by Beijing's Geological Environmental Monitoring Institute (GEMI), reported that over-pumping has largely depleted the shallow aquifer, forcing well-drillers to resort to the region's deep …

Last month, scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration laboratory in Boulder, Colo., reported that a huge dust storm from northern China had reached the U.S. "blanketing areas from Canada to Arizona with a layer of dust." They reported that along the foothills of the Rockies, the mountains were obscured by the dust from China. This dust storm did not come as a surprise. In early March, the People's Daily reported that the season's first dust storm -- one of the earliest on record -- had hit Beijing. These dust storms, coupled with last year's, were among the worst …

As the new century begins, the competition between cars and crops for cropland is intensifying. Until now, the paving over of cropland has occurred largely in industrial countries, home to four-fifths of the world's 520 million automobiles. But now, more and more farmland is being sacrificed in developing countries with hungry populations, calling into question the future role of the car. There's no such thing as free parking. Millions of acres of cropland in the industrial world have been paved over for roads and parking lots. Each U.S. car, for example, requires on average 0.18 acres of paved land for …

Droughts in the United States, Ethiopia, and Afghanistan have been big news this year -- and even more serious water shortages are emerging as the demand for water in many areas of the world simply outruns the supply. Water tables are now falling on every continent. Literally scores of countries are facing water shortages. All cracked up. We live in a water-challenged world, one that is becoming more so each year as 80 million additional people stake their claims to the Earth's water resources. Unfortunately, nearly all the 3 billion people projected to be added to the planet over the …

Farmers and ranchers in the United States are discovering that they own not only land, but also the wind rights that accompany it. A farmer in Iowa who leases a quarter acre of cropland to the local utility as a site for a wind turbine can typically earn $2,000 a year in royalties from the electricity produced. In a good year, that same plot can produce $100 worth of corn. Double your pleasure -- two different crops. Photo: NREL/PIX. Wind turbines strung across a farm at appropriate intervals can provide a welcome boost to farm income, yielding a year-round cash …