Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Bart Anderson The New Yorker and other mainstream voices are spreading the message about the seriousness of climate change, and the possibility of an apocalypse. The Pope too says that the climate is in an emergency and asks the world to abandon fossil fuels.
Tverberg claims that added debt cannot seem to provide oil and other energy sources at cheap enough prices for the economy to flourish.
Solar energy is a commodity that is produced, and that it requires extractive industries and chemical industries and landscapes, end of life management plans. It doesn’t inherently come with sustainability.
President Trump’s announcement that he thinks the U.S. should consider buying Greenland was widely ridiculed. But what he is proposing has a long pedigree in American history. And, he is tapping into very deep yearning in the American psyche.
When we discard a plastic bag, an electronic device encased in plastic, a plastic pen emptied of its ink or any of the myriad plastic objects which populate our lives, we usually say we are throwing the object “away.”
I put “away” in quotes because if there were ever any piece of evidence to convince us that there is no “away,” it is the discovery of tiny particles of plastic in the Arctic ice, deep oceans and high mountains.
Will shale oil rise again from the dead as it did after the 2014-2016 price decline? That will happen only if two things occur: 1) The oil price rises significantly and 2) investors have a serious bout of amnesia.
When politicians set a lofty goal like zero emissions, engineers scramble. Platitudes may win elections, but it takes timber and nails to build bridges. Or willows and biochar to deal with our sh*t.
Indianan Jim Brainard has been making the post-partisan case for building sustainable, resilient cities for more than 20 years. As a self-identified conservative Republican who not only believes in climate science but has made it his personal mission to incorporate sustainable urban planning and climate resilience into his vision for Carmel, Brainard has become a symbol of what post-partisan climate leadership can and should look like.
f you’ve heard of Frank Luntz, you may know him as the evil-genius messaging expert who advised Republicans how to twist words to support their policy priorities. But Luntz seems to have gotten religion on climate. He has stopped minimizing the problem of global heating and has instead decided to do the opposite — to try to help activists raise the alarm.
Practically every device, piece of software and internet platform not only holds the promise of enhancing the individual’s power but also can be weaponized to undermine it.
Russian science seems to have rejected the current understanding of climate change as seen in the West. Yet, we must keep trying to bridge the gap: if people don’t speak to each other, the only way they have to communicate is to fight.
It used to be a mantra in environmental circles that “the solution to pollution is dilution.” That simply isn’t tenable anymore, and it probably never was.
