The Climate Movement Needs More Radicals
By Samuel Miller McDonald, The Trouble
One of the protesters called out to the crowd gathered on Waterloo Bridge, “If you’ve ever wondered what you would have done during the Second World War, this is your answer.” Fighting evil in the 1940s was not a peaceful, niche enterprise. Doing so today must not be either.
What We Should Really Do for the Climate
By Samuel Miller McDonald, The Trouble
The fact is, there is no “best thing” and there are no easy little tweaks that will amount to mitigating climate change. We each have to do a lot.
A Pyrrhic Climate
By Samuel Miller McDonald, Activist Lab
A recent debate in twitter’s climate community illuminated a schism between those arguing that mitigating climate change is impossible and those exhorting others to continue to “fight” climate change.
Crime of the 21st Century: Perpetrators of Apocalypse, or, The Seven Circles of Hell
By Samuel Miller McDonald, Activist Lab
You and I are witnessing the twenty-first century’s great crime: a global holocaust whose first victims have already perished. Fossil energy economies are doing this. They transform the world into a deathly, suffocating hothouse sabotaging the climate and atmosphere. That’s what they do.
A Jobless Economy
By Samuel Miller McDonald, Activist Lab
Despite the legitimate concerns surrounding a guaranteed income, there is at least one self-evident ethical reason a guaranteed, non-labor income of no less than equivalent to a living wage (today about $15 per hour) should pay every American: most today suffer a state of forced labor.
The World’s Most Important Policy
By Samuel Miller McDonald, Activist Lab
There is one action that can make major strides in many of the world’s greatest challenges. It is generally overlooked, undersold, and ignored. It’s this: transitioning the economy to a distributed, non-carbon energy system.
Extinction vs. Collapse
By Samuel Miller McDonald, Activist Lab
Climate twitter – the most fun twitter – has recently been reigniting the debate between human extinction and mere civilizational collapse, between doom and gloom, despair and (kind of) hope.
The Big Story: Can We Change Civilization by Changing Its Origin Story?
By Samuel Miller McDonald, Activist Lab
The “oil curse” refers to a long-studied phenomenon in which states that adopt petroleum as a significant foundation of their economy tend toward dictatorship. Of the top ten oil producing countries in the world, nine are oligarchies.