Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Kurt Cobb The vast majority of Americans say they support the rapid introduction of renewable energy production. But when it comes to actually deploying it in one of the best places to do so, they don’t like it.
While I was eventually able to get off the treadmill without too much of a stumble, I think human society is facing a similar dynamic, and I don’t know how graceful our collective dismount will be. More than anything, I want my friends, family, and neighbors to understand the consequences of our collective trajectory. The technical name for the ratcheting-up, “curse of competence” dynamic is the Jevons Paradox.
COP28 is the first COP to raise discussion about the public health impacts of climate change. Organisations representing 46 million health professionals have written to Sultan Al Jaber, calling for a total phase-out of fossil fuels. The World Health Organisation has exhorted ministers of health to make “health” a force for propelling climate action, via climate-friendly healthcare systems…
As I took my first breath in this future neighborhood, the air had a fragrant quality that I didn’t recognize. I could hear a person shout something, maybe a block away. It’s much quieter than the world I left. There’s certainly a smell of home cooking in the air. And there’s a lot more plants of all sizes and description wherever I look. That’s it! The air carries a mixture of fruit scents.
The story takes place in a near-future version of western Canada and centers on a fictional town called River Meadows, which once served as an epicenter for the extraction and production of a fossil fuel-like substance called ghost ore. This ore is vastly more energy-dense than any previously known energy source, and its environmental impacts are equally unprecedented. When emitted into the environment, it unleashes disruptive temporal anomalies known as “decoherences,” which severely warp people’s perception of reality.
Think of science as a powerful tool, like maybe a power saw. It can really take things apart. But it’s not always the right tool. Maybe it seldom is, in fact. We also don’t want to put it in the hands of children, or use it without first thinking carefully about the consequences and if there might in fact be more productive paths.
The enactment of bold new climate policies—bold enough to quickly drive US greenhouse-gas emissions down to zero—can succeed only if we defeat the looming threat of far-right authoritarianism. And today, the nation’s anti-democracy, fossil-fuel-loving political minority appears more determined than ever to gain enough power to turn us into a sweltering autocracy.
Now it’s so obvious that the system is failing, progress is finally possible.
With COP28 starting and this time hosted in one of the most intensely carbon polluting countries, it is time to reflect on the where and what of the climate movement. …We need to learn to search in ourselves for the points where false hope is keeping us from really expressing what deep down we are convinced of. In other words, we need to grow up and break the chains of self-censorship…
Amid the daily headlines about the nightmare in Gaza and the earlier ones about the war in Ukraine, that other war, the potentially ultimate one that humanity is waging on the planet itself (with the slow-motion equivalent of nuclear weapons — the burning of fossil fuels), is getting all too little attention. And yet it should be considered the equivalent, even if in slow-motion, of World War III.
We are an environmental humanities researcher and an AI scholar. When we asked ChatGPT if AI systems can help address the environmental crisis, the response unsurprisingly was optimistic. We had reasons not to trust it. Chatbots are not designed for veracity, but for guessing what the answer to a prompt would be based on content that has been previously written by others (humans and machines). The answers tend to favor the most popular, not necessarily the most critical, content.
A Mennonite book on the coming crisis: “We are fighting to dismantle structures designed to remove Indigenous Peoples from their land so that our economic system can continue to extract and consume resources at an ever-increasing pace. This growth-based system, designed to generate wealth and profits for individuals, is threatening the survival of all life on this planet. Climate change, I have realized, is only one symptom of the real threat, which is ecological overshoot. “
