Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
After a years-long popular resistance against a proposed fracked gas storage project in Seneca Lake, N.Y., the people have emerged victorious. The Arlington Storage Company announced Wednesday that it was finally abandoning a contentious plan to store fracked gas in unlined salt caverns along the pristine lake in New York’s Finger Lakes region.
Predictably there’s been a lot written over the last few weeks about the Paris Climate Agreement and whether the Trump administration will continue to sit with other nations. Driving the coverage is the on-again off-again meeting between Trump and a pack of senior advisors. The ultimate decision will remain for The Donald to make–purportedly after the G-7 summit at the end of May.
Given that most people in industrialized countries accept that climate change is a scientific reality, why do so few rank climate change as one of their high priorities? Why do so few people discuss climate change with their families, friends, and neighbours?
The smooth passage of money bills–from the House to the Senate and on to the President–envisioned some 230 years ago– has not been the norm since Jimmy Carter took office.
All over the world, bicycles from renewable materials are gaining ground. Egyptian Karim Creta is experimenting with a local variety: palm midribs.
The cost of allowing global temperature to rise to 2C, rather than capping warming at 1.5C, is an area of permafrost the size of Mexico, according to new research. The study, carried out by a team of scientists from Sweden, Norway and the UK, is the first to work out what the ambitious targets contained in the Paris Agreement mean for permafrost loss.
We study environmental politics, and believe the health care debate holds an important lesson for green advocates: Policies that create concrete benefits for specific constituencies are hard to discontinue.
The expanding economies of Asia, Africa and the Middle East are placing such great demands on global sand supplies that scarcity could soon prove to be an hyperbole. The sand spoken of here is that used for fracking, construction and industrial processes, e.g. glass and silicone manufacture.
The movements for climate justice and environmental justice are about healing deep wounds of injustice and oppression via environmental action. Climate action can, if done right, be a powerful force for making a society more equal and advancing human rights. It can be a catalyst for positive social change.
To state the obvious, sand mining is—mining. Whatever one might be digging for at the end of their personal rainbows—coal, gold, a short cut to China, or sand—it involves a violation of earth’s surface.
How can the Kissimmee team and others best restore degraded environments in the face of the unpredictable and tumultuous future that climate change promises? A big part of the answer is by building in resilience — the ability to resist change or to recover from disturbance in a way that preserves the essence of a system’s structure and function.
Researchers have once again linked a sequence of devastating climate events to global warming fuelled by prodigal human use of fossil fuels. And this time, they believe they have identified the agency behind the blazing summers that have claimed lives and destroyed livelihoods repeatedly during this century.
