Climate Politics/Capitol Light (25)

The rise in the percentage of young Republicans that are concerned about the future of Earth’s climate and its populations is a critical bit of information. It speaks to a better future.

It will be interesting to see if the youth on the right and left are any better able to cooperate than the generation that has gone before.

Pipeline Permit Scandal Highlights Confusion Amid Push to Build Plastics Plants

The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) audit highlights what can go wrong when state and local regulators are unprepared for the arrival of a powerful industry, illustrating the pressures when once-unobtrusive offices suddenly take on outsized importance amid a push to promote rapid development.

Retreating from Rising Seas isn’t a Win or a Defeat — it’s Reality

“Managed retreat” is a controversial response to climate change. It’s the idea that communities and governments should be strategic about moving people away from areas that have become too waterlogged to live in safely.

The Agrarian Alternative

Such an agrarian civilization will see no impending ecological doom but instead a future of steady processes and patterns with no need for faith in great technological inventions of salvation. Not a utopian world – surely grappling with problems of their own – but a wise culture; taking the lessons of a past society bent on ever-more for ever-more’s sake to heart and respecting limits.

Landscape as a Whole at the Hulsman Ranch

The daily tasks may seem menial, but as Hannah puts it, “Being out there reinforces everything in life —having a hand in maintaining how things are.” The large plans and the small tasks are both a part of continuing the ranch’s legacy to see and treat the land as a whole.

False Hopes for a Green New Deal

The Green New Deal pivots on a central lie of continued growth, promising this growth and employment whilst pretending it can magic away the environmental and humanitarian consequences. The result of this is that on all three counts – infinite growth, reliance on fossil fuels, and colonial resource extraction – the Green New Deal is unable to challenge the prevailing order.

A Statement on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Special Report on Climate Change and Land from Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities

We—Indigenous Peoples and local communities—play a critical role in stewarding and safeguarding the world’s lands and forests. For the first time, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report released today recognizes that strengthening our rights is a critical solution to the climate crisis.

Half-Baked and Out of Time

Representative democracy was the political system that most successfully exploited capitalism for the generation of wealth, but in recent years it has been compromised by the power of corporations through lobbying and donations, and has proved to be an unsatisfactory vehicle for generating equity and for responsiveness to long-term problems.