Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Albert Bates The task of Project Drawdown was not to create new data but to look at the hundred most promising solutions to climate change and rank them, based on cost, readiness, impact and scalability. The results were just published April 18 by Penguin as Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming. It is already the number one bestseller and at this writing is sold out on Amazon.
Analysis by Carbon Brief finds that if the US reneges on its Paris pledge and takes no action to reduce emissions, it could result in around 0.2C to 0.3C additional warming, whereas a delay in implementation of four or eight years would have minimal impact. Carbon Brief explains how these temperature estimates are made and explores the impacts of Paris, with and without US participation.
Live long enough in Capital City and you can’t help but gain a feel for what Alice must have felt as she tumbled down the rabbit hole. Had Lewis Carroll been born a century and a half later and needed a city to use as the inspiration for his Wonderland Washington, in the Trump era, might just have filled the bill.
Your body makes itself from the matter around you. What you eat, drink, inhale, touch, and experience literally becomes you. You are your environment, and it is you. Releasing toxic substances into the environment means injecting them into bodies, human and non-human. The climate system connects everyone’s environments.
While this hotel in Athens, Greece might not offer those conventional services, it provides something far better: Free housing, medical care and meals for hundreds of people who have had to flee their countries.
Regenerative agriculture and land use encompass the traditional and indigenous best practices of organic farming, animal husbandry and environmental conservation. Regeneration puts a central focus on improving soil health and fertility (recarbonizing the soil), increasing biodiversity, and qualitatively enhancing forest health, animal welfare, food nutrition and rural (especially small farmer) prosperity.
Industry and government claims that Kinder Morgan’s Trans Mountain pipeline expansion will boost prices for heavy Canadian crude have no basis in reality, says one of the nation’s top energy analysts. In a brief yet damning report David Hughes, a former federal government energy researcher, concluded that tripling the pipeline’s capacity won’t deliver an extra $73 billion in revenue over two decades as claimed by Kinder Morgan.
It is clear that the power to lobby continues to expand and to infiltrate all levels of government. Funds devoted to lobbying by fossil fuel companies are increasing rapidly at the provincial level. On many levels, democracy is weakening and inequality is rising, while environmental disaster looms. What kinds of changes could help to restore an effective social passion for the common good?
Here’s a talk that Rob Hopkins gave in May 2017 at the Triodos Bank AGM in Bristol, UK, on Transition and his hopes for the future.
The problem with the Eurozone is that it is a monetary union that does not have the necessary requisites of a fiscal union and political union that would set up the rules and mechanisms to allow the central authorities to move capital from surplus to deficit regions.
It would be difficult to get through life without the capacity to consider various options and to decide what to do. The lack of any decision criteria has caused many a donkey caught between two bales of hay to starve to death.
Transportation accounts for nearly a third of the country’s carbon emissions, of which 84 percent is attributed to cars and commercial trucks, the EPA reports. So, as Moyer sees it, it’s obvious that climate change and infrastructure should be tackled in tandem.
