Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Well, it finally happened. An infrastructure bill has found its way onto a president’s desk for signing. Affectionately called the BIF in the halls of Congress and along the K Street corridor where the cognoscenti congregate, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Framework was truly that—bipartisan.
Investors, foundations, universities and governments pulled their assets from fossil fuel companies in record numbers in October.
It may take a bit to integrate better all the moving parts—or, as a friend and colleague says the community needs to slow down to go faster. Will a better alignment and integration be worth it?
Think of it this way. To change the power, you must be the power.
The obsession with mining the Moon strikes me as the kind of fantasy that enters into civilizations when they are faced with huge, seemingly insurmountable problems—climate change and resource depletion come to mind—and they want magical solutions that allow them to forego having actually to face those problems.
Let’s just stop producing this great tidal wave of consumer goods. And let’s find other ways of measuring quality of life…
We must make the right to a safe, clean, healthy and sustainable environment a universal, legally binding human right, starting with the UN codifying this new declaration into existing treaties, then making it legally binding on the national and international level.
The magnitude and complexity of climate change mean it has to be addressed steadily over time. It’s too big a problem to solve with one bite of the apple.
“Climate Adaptation” takes the perspective that socioeconomic collapse is probable. Rather than giving up hope, it seeks to outline ways people and communities can adapt to it.
It is well past the time to face hard decisions of how to reduce obscene levels of corporate production instead of fiddling with perpetual energy fantasies while the planet burns.
One after another politicians, business leaders, journalists and NGO advocates talk about “net zero 2050” and the 1.5°C Paris goal in the same breath, and get away with it.
A little-known menace lurks beneath the sea. In oceans around the world, thousands of sunken World War II vessels litter the seafloor, their fuel tanks rusting away and either actively leaking or poised to leak their contents into the environment.
Our recent study, which examined whether building denser and taller is the right path to sustainability, busts this myth: we found that densely built, low-rise environments are more space and carbon efficient, while high-rise buildings have a drastically higher carbon impact.
