Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
In this detailed Q&A, Carbon Brief unpacks what the IPCC’s Special Report on climate change and land says about how climate change affects the land and vice versa, as well as other key topics such as food security, negative emissions and how to tackle the overlapping challenges associated with how humans use the land.
The way forward for any climate defense plan—moderate or progressive—is going to be cluttered with the refuse of the Trump administration, e.g., rolled back regulations, extant lawsuits, the lost government offices and programs needed to implement a pro-environment agenda.
Desertification has been described as the “the greatest environmental challenge of our time” and climate change is making it worse.
Being present in the now, connecting with nature, knowing you’re doing all you can to heal Gaia and prepare yourself and your community for the transition that is coming, and avoiding the bits of modernity that foment anxiety: all of that will help reorient you, dulling the anxiety and helplessness you feel, strengthening your sense of self and purpose and hopefully helping you to stay committed to using your life energy to heal the planet that you are part of and utterly depend on.
“Yes, this is coming apart,, We have to reckon with the grief. We have to reckon with the anger. We have to reckon with the fear. And we have to know that deep inside we actually have power and agency, and we can make a difference. When it’s a fight for your life, you’re willing to throw down, especially if you are doing it in a community together.”
The conversation you hear about the environment on CNN is not the conversation taking place in college dorms or outdoors clubs or in community centers or on farms or in the heads of those who hope and fight and when they sleep they dream of mountain air and when they close their eyes at work for just a moment are no further removed from the ocean than the fish who swim in it. And they are getting louder.
It is important to make the connection between beauty and nature obvious and to name beauty as the quality in nature we so desire. If we don’t, we continue allegiance to the very paradigm that has been so destructive of the human-nature relations, the paradigm that erased value from the natural world and made beauty nothing more than a subjective opinion.
The transition from the ‘precedented’ world that I grew up in to the ‘unprecedented’ world that has begun to take hold has happened entirely within my lifetime.
Russian science seems to have rejected the current understanding of climate change as seen in the West. Yet, we must keep trying to bridge the gap: if people don’t speak to each other, the only way they have to communicate is to fight.
It used to be a mantra in environmental circles that “the solution to pollution is dilution.” That simply isn’t tenable anymore, and it probably never was.
Major automakers and the California Air Resources Board (CARB) have reached an agreement to increase fleet fuel efficiencies to nearly 50 miles per gallon on average by 2026. The companies–Ford, Honda, Volkswagen and BMW of North America—along with California regulators took matters into their own hands, after the Trump administration planned to freeze the standard at the 2020 level.
But when it comes to methane, “we actually have technological, practical solutions to these problems,” McKain said. The most viable solution, for now? Cities making infrastructure upgrades and replacing leaky pipes.
