Common Sense for the 21st Century (excerpt)

What does a real Climate Emergency action plan look like? The answer is defined by the science − by the physics and chemistry. Some find it hard to imagine this is actually happening. Some think it seems ‘unrealistic’. But ask yourself about the alternative of risking the collapse of civilisation, the death of billions of people and the extinction of much of life on earth? Is that ‘realistic’? No economy on a dead planet.

Climate Watchdog Warns US Fracking Boom Leading to 30% Rise in Greenhouse Gas Emissions by 2025

Planet-heating pollution from the U.S. oil, gas, and petrochemical industries could rise about 30% by 2025 compared with 2018 because of additional drilling and 157 new or expanded projects “fueled by the fracking boom,” an environmental watchdog group warned Wednesday.

The Core of a United Global Movement Reacting to the Ecological and Climate Crisis

The world is on fire.

We need a global political movement in the broadest, not party-political sense. We cannot go on watching the rainforest burn, the German coal power plants produce CO2 and people as well as millions of animals die in Australia´s bushfires. We need a common and global reaction.

How Getting Rid of ‘Shit Jobs’ and the Metric of Productivity can Combat Climate change

Work can be “shit” or it can be good. Sociologists and psychologists have developed various frameworks to explain what makes a job good or bad. And we’ve identified a few common factors. A good job is socially useful, it provides material security, it is varied and creative, and it offers us a degree of autonomy. A shit job does nothing for society, fails to help us meet our material needs, is repetitive, and offers little autonomy.

Education or Exploitation?

The point about education is that you put money in and get education out, not that you get rich. If you don’t put the right amount of money into the right things, you don’t get a good education out; you get wasted years, resentful and uneducated graduates, and an unprepared citizenry and workforce. How profitable is that?

Urban Agriculture is Dead! Cities have One, Two, Three…Many Urban Agricultures!

We betray the Greek origin of western styles of thinking every time we use the singular to discuss the opposite — the sheer abundance and bounty of foods and food choices that modern living and technologies offer.

So, for example, we have city discussions about the need for a city policy on urban agriculture, instead of city discussions about the need for city policies to support various forms of urban agricultures.

Soil Health Hits the Big Time!

Best of all, regenerative agriculture was acknowledged as a shovel-ready solution to climate change. That’s a big reason why over one hundred nations, NGOs, and agricultural organizations signed onto the original ‘4 For 1000 Initiative’. “[It] has become a global initiative,” said French Agriculture Minister Stéphane Le Foll. “We need to mobilize even more stakeholders in a transition to achieve both food security and climate mitigation thanks to agriculture.”

How Wages are Linked to Energy Consumption: Data and Theory

How do economic analyses account for the roles and impacts of both the cost and quantity of natural resource consumption?

This question has been debated perhaps as long as there has been the profession of economics.  Before the use of fossil fuels, early “classical” economists knew that most products of interest, such as food and building materials, came from the land as it harnesses the energy from the sun. Thus, land as a natural resource was front-and-center to economic thinking.