Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
It’s critically important for climate activists to understand what policies and programs are possible under reconciliation. According to the House Budget Committee, only policies that change spending or revenues can be included.
India’s commitment to full railway electrification by 2023 shows that rapid rail decarbonisation is possible when strong political will and large-scale public investment are part of the equation.
This is the first in an occasional series on US climate policy at a time when uncivil wars are raging within the two major political parties and, indeed, the nation itself.
It appears that OPEC has finally won its long war against shale oil as beaten up investors seek their fortunes elsewhere.
What could bring down the industrial civilization? Would it be global warming (fire) or resource depletion (ice)? At present, it may well be that depletion is hitting us faster. But, in the long run, global warming may hit us much harder. Maybe the fall of our civilization will be Fire AND ice.
In this intervention I highlight an element that has been overlooked in this important debate about “progressive environmental futures” – the dismantling of fossil capitalism.
Unlike the Jason Kenney government, Albertans understand in a visceral way that water is the only true treasure in an arid land, and that mountain brooks quickly lose their song if we dig up all the rocks for coking coal to fuel steel mills.
The running joke in Capital City for the past four and a half years is that every week is infrastructure week. It’s agreed by both Republicans and Democrats that US infrastructure is in woeful condition.
While many of the above facts are well known among those who follow the subject of fossil fuel depletion, they aren’t often presented as accessibly or concisely as in Friedemann’s book Life After Fossil Fuels.
A group of Indigenous women opposed to the Line 3 pipeline on Thursday invited Interior Secretary Deb Haaland—the first Native American woman to hold her Cabinet position and a professed critic of fossil fuel infrastructure on public and tribal lands—to visit northern Minnesota and “learn more about the impacts” of the tar sands project first-hand.
Investment icon Warren Buffett once wrote in a letter to shareholders, “You only find out who is swimming naked when the tide goes out.” In the wake of the pandemic, the tide has gone out in U.S. shale oil and the naked swimmers are all around. With this decline of the so-called “shale miracle” is a peak in world oil production already behind us?
“It is probably political suicide to tell people that they are going to have to consume less energy and lower their lifestyles,” said Dave Hughes. “And that explains why politicians promise the moon.”
