Climate Change Won’t Stop for the Coronavirus Pandemic
The next several months could bring hurricanes, floods and fire, on top of the pandemic currently raging through the country. How do you shelter in place during an evacuation?
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Open and Answered Questions
In this lagniappe episode, we ask: what are some unanswered questions about the energy transition from five years ago, but that seem answered today? And what are the new questions that have emerged over the past five years which remain unanswered today?
Trump’s Coronavirus Playbook is the Same One he Uses for Climate Change
There is one major distinction between the coronavirus and climate change. The coronavirus may, in time, level off, after a record number of deaths and a body blow to our economy. But the effects of climate change are not reversible.
Ecological and Feminist Economics: an Interview with Julie A. Nelson
It’s much easier to teach students how to shift curves, solve equations, and run regressions, than to carefully observe economic life and think deeply and critically about it. Students also tend to feel comfortable – and even feel powerful – when told “here, we are handing you the exact tools and models you need to use to understand how the economy works.”
The Self Sufficiency Surge
One can only hope that this wave of newbie gardeners carries on regardless, once we emerge from this crisis, blinking into the brave new greener world ahead of us.
Restoring Soils could Remove up to ‘5.5bn tonnes’ of Greenhouse Gases Every Year
Replenishing and protecting the world’s soil carbon stores could help to offset up to 5.5bn tonnes of greenhouse gases every year, a study finds.
This is just under the current annual emissions of the US, the world’s second largest polluter after China.
Avenger Planet
The coronavirus may not, in retrospect, prove to be the tipping point that upends human civilization as we know it, but it should serve as a warning that we will experience ever more such events in the future as the world heats up.
What Might We Learn from COVID-19?
We make decisions, not on known outcomes but on imagined projections standing on theories of how things work. These projections have an ethical range called the ‘planning horizon.’ The better we understand the world the broader the reach of our anticipations. Conscience serves to measure how well we encompass social effects.
Please Don’t Read this Blog. Do Something Else Instead.
So I have decided to do something counterintuitive, and write a blog that I really hope you won’t read, because its intention is that that you might instead use the time you would have spent reading it to close your laptop screen and go and do something else instead.
Good (enough) Choices in Bad Times
Now that we’ve patted ourselves down to check for wounds to our wallets or cupboards or health, I challenge us to plant the question in our hearts – who isn’t safe, needs support, needs allies – and see what grows.
Who will you be on the other side of this?
After the Pandemic: a Ten-Point Plan for the Collective Provision of Basic Needs
This manifesto is an intervention by a Europe-wide group of academics – the foundational economy collective – who have for several years in books and articles argued that policy makers need to balance concern with jobs and wages with more attention to essential goods and services like housing, food, utility supply, health, education and care.
Ask a Reductionist Question and You will Get a Reductionist Answer
In the article “Towards better representation of organic agriculture in life cycle assessments” in Nature sustainability, van der Werf, Knudsen and Cederberg, from France, Denmark and Sweden respectively demonstrate the inadequacy of LCA for comparisons between conventional production systems and agro-ecological and organic systems.
