Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
COP28 is the first COP to raise discussion about the public health impacts of climate change. Organisations representing 46 million health professionals have written to Sultan Al Jaber, calling for a total phase-out of fossil fuels. The World Health Organisation has exhorted ministers of health to make “health” a force for propelling climate action, via climate-friendly healthcare systems…
The enactment of bold new climate policies—bold enough to quickly drive US greenhouse-gas emissions down to zero—can succeed only if we defeat the looming threat of far-right authoritarianism. And today, the nation’s anti-democracy, fossil-fuel-loving political minority appears more determined than ever to gain enough power to turn us into a sweltering autocracy.
Now it’s so obvious that the system is failing, progress is finally possible.
With COP28 starting and this time hosted in one of the most intensely carbon polluting countries, it is time to reflect on the where and what of the climate movement. …We need to learn to search in ourselves for the points where false hope is keeping us from really expressing what deep down we are convinced of. In other words, we need to grow up and break the chains of self-censorship…
Amid the daily headlines about the nightmare in Gaza and the earlier ones about the war in Ukraine, that other war, the potentially ultimate one that humanity is waging on the planet itself (with the slow-motion equivalent of nuclear weapons — the burning of fossil fuels), is getting all too little attention. And yet it should be considered the equivalent, even if in slow-motion, of World War III.
We are an environmental humanities researcher and an AI scholar. When we asked ChatGPT if AI systems can help address the environmental crisis, the response unsurprisingly was optimistic. We had reasons not to trust it. Chatbots are not designed for veracity, but for guessing what the answer to a prompt would be based on content that has been previously written by others (humans and machines). The answers tend to favor the most popular, not necessarily the most critical, content.
Just Stop Oil plays a vital role: giving voice to suppressed emotions that government, business, and mainstream media refuse to reckon with. Their tactics are disruptive not just because they make people late for work, but also because they shine light on the elephant in the room: collapsing ecosystems, confused political systems, and the collective trauma of living through the breakdown of the world as we know it.
To achieve biodiversity goals, conservation organizations need to ensure local residents play a lead role in designing and implementing initiatives.
We found that the cities could cut carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions by a combined 22%, without cutting residents’ quality of life measured via an aggregate, monetised metric.
If there is one resource that seems like it would be truly inexhaustible, it’s sand. But we are now using sand at an unsustainable rate.
After three weeks of infighting, it appears that the hardline MAGA Republican House minority remains in control of the lower chamber. The question dominating Washington politics is how willing they will be to compromise with the Senate and the White House. Only time will tell.
What I am saying is that a system powerful enough to destroy ecological health and biodiversity—which we have demonstrated in spades—cannot survive unless it deliberately refrains from using this power. It must invert the cultural hierarchy and place ecosystem health—the vitality of the biodiverse planet—above all other considerations
