which made sense to me. I considered emphasizing environmental engineering, but ultimately structural analysis spoke to me. I spent the next 39 years as a structural engineer mostly in a Research and Development environment. I developed a reputation as an excellent problem solver, often in areas where I was not an expert or even knowledgeable. Over the years, ideas from Limits to Growth had been fermenting in the background. In the year 2000, I began my climate change journey. I was working as an engineer on the energy saving effects of cool roofs for building energy standards. Soon the discussion changed to the effect of cool roofs on climate change. I didn’t know much about climate change, so I did some digging. I came to three conclusions: climate change was real, we were causing it by emitting CO₂ from the burning of fossil fuels, and the effects, while uncertain, were very bad. I started focusing on improving the energy efficiency of homes including developing cost effective zero energy homes. This led to evaluations of the effects of efficiency improvements on climate change and the conclusion that while efficiency improvements can help significantly, they are not enough. In 2007, I started working in our company’s Sustainability organization where I found that energy use is inextricably linked to the size of our economy as measured by GDP. I retired in 2014.

Of course, there were several considerations in my decision to retire, but one of them was to have more time to explore the connection between climate change and the economy. In retirement, I have been working on the economics of low or no growth and am particularly concerned with inequality, and our ability to manage the stability of the economic/financial system in low growth scenarios. I am the Director of the Upstate South Carolina Chapter of the Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy and have written blogs for the Post Growth Institute. I have also completed the Climate Reality Project Leadership Training in March 2019. All this ultimately led to this book.