Profit vs. Ethics
By Ian Angus, Great Transition Initiative
Moral judgments in lieu of causal understanding—that phrase should be inscribed over the entrance of every department of environmental ethics.
Blue Acceleration: Capitalism’s Growing Assault on the Oceans
By Ian Angus, Climate and Capitalism
“The Blue Acceleration: The Trajectory of Human Expansion into the Ocean,” published in January in the journal One Earth, describes and graphs capital’s growing drive to industrialize the oceans and sea beds. Commercial activity in the oceans is expanding rapidly, and “considerable investments … are driving growth in existing industries and the emergence of new ones, spanning an increasingly diverse range of activities.”
Nitrogen Glut: Too Much of a Good Thing is Deadly for the Biosphere
By Ian Angus, Climate and Capitalism
Climate change deniers often claim that carbon dioxide cannot be harmful because plants need it to grow. The same false argument can be made about nitrogen, and our reply is the same: too much of a good thing can be deadly. Organisms and ecosystems that evolved in a world where the supply of reactive nitrogen was strictly limited are now being disrupted, in many cases destroyed, by an unprecedented nitrogen glut.
As Climate Crisis Grows, Temperatures Set Global Records
By Ian Angus, Climate & Capitalism
The global land and ocean surface temperature departure from average for July 2019 was the highest for the month of July, making it the warmest month overall in the 140-year NOAA global temperature dataset record, which dates back to 1880.
Nitrogen Crisis: A Neglected Threat to Earth’s Life Support Systems
By Ian Angus, Climate and Capitalism
The rift in the nitrogen cycle is a major threat to the stability of the Earth System. This and subsequent articles will discuss how the natural cycle works and how it has been disrupted in the Anthropocene.
Broiler Chickens: The Defining Species of the Anthropocene?
By Ian Angus, Climate and Capitalism
An important new paper, published in the journal Royal Society Open Science (RSOS), makes a convincing case that modern broiler chickens are a “distinct and characteristic new morphospecies ….[that] symbolizes the unprecedented human reconfiguration of the Earth’s biosphere.”
The Climate Report that Trump Tried to Bury
By Ian Angus, Climate and Capitalism
In an obvious attempt to keep it out of the news, the Trump administration released the most recent report — Volume 2 of the Fourth National Climate Assessment — at 2pm on the day after Thanksgiving. The 1656-page report begins with a blunt statement that “Earth’s climate is now changing faster than at any point in the history of modern civilization.
Climate Change in the Anthropocene: An Unstoppable Drive to Hothouse Earth?
By Ian Angus, Climate and Capitalism
Can the global climate be stabilized before runaway change creates conditions that are too hot for human civilization and deadly for most species?