Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
We can’t count on governments alone to do the work necessary – governments, from Canada and America to Russia and Saudi Arabia to China and India, are still too often beholden to the fossil fuel companies. We need to keep pushing hard on those companies – and we will.
The new Civil Society Equity Review report — After Paris: Inequality, Fair Shares, and the Climate Emergency — argues that we need to expand our focus from inequality between nations to inequality within nations as well.
Reality 101 addresses humanity’s toughest challenges: economic decline, inequality, pollution, biodiversity loss, and war. Students learn about systems ecology, neuroscience, and economics. “We ask hard questions,” says Hagens. “What is wealth? What are the limits to growth? We attempt to face our crises head on.”
If we are to mitigate catastrophic climate change and also reverse the catastrophically increasing chasm between rich and poor, first, we must reclaim the common.
So yes, let’s dramatically increase clean stuff and reduce dirty stuff (in terms of their share of total economic activity), and let’s do this with massive public investment. Here we agree. But there’s no reason to nonetheless keep increasing aggregate economic activity forever.
International migration, then, is controversial every which way you choose to look at it. So let me take a deep breath and try to define a pragmatism of my own around the issue
Like the traditional religious dogmas that he mocks, his own implicit stories wield great influence over the global power elite as long as they remain unacknowledged. I invite Harari to examine them here. By recognizing them as the myths they actually are, he could potentially transform his own ability to help shape humanity’s future.
If we reduce all of our efforts at addressing our problems to language a machine can understand, we will get machine solutions. What we need, however, are solutions that come from our deep connections to this planet as beings of this planet, connections that no machine will ever fathom.
Should fossil fuel companies that knew their products contributed to climate change for nearly 40 years and did nothing about it now be allowed to have their say inside the UN climate talks?
What are the risks to the autonomy of the independent nonprofit sector—not to mention our democracy—when a growing amount of philanthropic power is held in fewer hands?
Suburban catastrophists such as James Kunstler argue that fossil fuel depletion will turn our suburbs into urban wastelands. But we see the suburbs as an ideal place to begin retrofitting our cities.
The Paris Accord was truly historic in its having gotten 195 nations to agree to it. In this day and age getting any agreement between nations on a matter as politically sensitive as climate change ranks as a minor miracle. Getting everyone of the nations to live up to the agreement is quite another matter.
