Why Is There So Little Action on Climate Change?
In effect, humanity is playing a game of Russian roulette. So what’s getting in the way of taking the necessary action?
In effect, humanity is playing a game of Russian roulette. So what’s getting in the way of taking the necessary action?
The sheer scale of the fossil fuel reserves that will need to be left unexploited for decades if world leaders sign up to a radical climate agreement is revealed in a study by a team of British scientists.
Around the world, carbon-based fuels are under attack. Increasingly grim economic pressures, growing popular resistance, and the efforts of government regulators have all shocked the energy industry.
This is the vicious circle of capitalism, which is speeding up the destruction of the commons, driven by a world economy based on consumption and growth.
California Governor Jerry Brown used the occasion of his fourth inaugural address to propose an ambitious new clean energy target for the state: 50% renewable energy by 2030.
Looking at the markets from a 30,000 foot level, some interesting shifts are occurring. And yet they are almost completely under the radar screen.
Unlike most books on the subject, which try to convince people using science, Don’t Even Think About It examines why the science doesn’t convince people.
Who now lives fully integrated with a clan, tribe, or other group ‘emplaced’ for many generations in a particular location and fully integrated into the ecology of that place?
As it happens, the planet’s changing climate now demands that we summon up the energy to leave behind the Age of Fossil Fuel (and maybe with it some portion of the Age of Capitalism as well).
The “Lima call for climate action” which came out of the recent UN climate talks, establishes a roadmap to a post-2020 agreement that will be weaker than the ongoing Cancun Agreement (for 2012-2020), and it lays a foundation for an even worse agreement in Paris in 2015.
Divestment is strictly the selling up of all fossil fuel share holdings. However it is currently difficult to decide which fossil should have priority for this though gas is widely, though probably inaccurately, considered to be of less priority than the other fossil fuels, or even exempt from divestment*.
The attraction of profit in the short-term overwhelms longer-term considerations, even for the most “enlightened” of businesspeople.