Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Roger Blanchard I believe we will see a fairly rapid decline in the production of shale oil and gas in the U.S. as a large number of fracking companies go bankrupt. I don’t see investors again being taken in by the promises of industry corporate executives, especially when the best drilling acreage is long gone. That is not a message I expect to hear on NPR.
The bottom line is, that despite the current urgency of the global pandemic, the climate crisis that brought us all together continues unabated. Indeed, scientists warn that the kind of global disruption we are now experiencing so keenly, will become increasingly common in the years to come unless we act now to sharply curb our CO2 emissions.
Small-scale fishing employs ten times as many people, has a much lower environmental impact, uses much less fuel and produces a fraction of the CO2 emissions, compared with industrial fishing – yet industrial fishing attracts far more subsidies than small-scale fishing.
DisCOs are a commons-oriented, feminist, cooperative way for people to work together. A set of ideals and criteria for ensuring that patterns of oppression and violence that permeate our society are not replicated within intentional, cooperative spaces. DisCOs systematize fairness and the recognition of care work.
The UK has just three decades to reach net-zero emissions and tree planting has emerged as a prominent part of the government’s plan to get there.
With technological solutions in their infancy, trees are for now the only scalable “negative emissions” strategy and can come with additional benefits for wildlife, flood management and health.
Coronavirus has put the kibosh on frivolous travel for the moment, but we might want to do some reflecting before returning to business as usual. Prior to the outbreak, you were constantly told to put on your traveling shoes, cue up some good music for a journey (no, not the band Journey), and pack your bags. But maybe this is the perfect time to start a new conversation about travel and begin aligning our actions with our values.
But we aren’t hopeless bystanders in this fight; we can’t stick our heads in the sand like cartoon ostriches and pretend this isn’t happening. As luck would have it, there is a successful strategy we can use – and we must – to flatten the curve and slow the spread of coronavirus: altruism.
I don’t know about you, but the never-ending stream of worrying news about the coronavirus and social distancing are taking a toll on my psyche. So I reached out to the delightful Leslie Davenport—a licensed psychotherapist who I got to know because of her work on climate psychology—to get her advice about how we can practice self-care, and care for our loved ones and neighbors, while trying to navigate this pandemic.
A wave of student-led actions swept across the campuses of around 60 U.S. and Canadian schools last month, as students turned to sit-ins, walkouts and banner drops to pressure universities into divesting their endowments from fossil fuel companies. Called “Divestment Day” by activists, the Feb. 13 series of actions was just the latest escalation for a movement that’s been undergoing a serious revival.
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.
Around 40% of this carbon offsetting potential would come from protecting existing soil carbon stores in the world’s existing forests, peatlands and wetlands, the authors say.
Long before the COVID-19 outbreak, fracking firms in the Permian Basin were experiencing a downturn. Now the dramatic devaluation of oil prices will likely bring the already declining drilling boom in the country’s shale regions to a near halt.
“I want to preserve the integrity of organic because there is so much confusion in labels making it hard for consumers to know what they’re getting,” Ron says. “The word organic needs to mean what it says.”
