Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Obama delivered a real stemwinder on the moral urgency of cutting carbon pollution (video, transcript below). So of course Politico reports, “Cable news skips Obama’s climate speech.”
While climate change is certainly a fact of the physical world, at its core it’s a social problem, born of our cultural emphasis on consumerism and growth.
We’re living in a time of growing fear of what I have come to call the “Big Primal.” …Our scientists confirm that we’re not all simply imagining that our weather has gone wild; for them, the warming of the oceans and the rising of the seas are facts, not theories.
Recently I read that our challenge in the twenty-first century is to triple global energy demand “so that the world’s poorest can enjoy modern living standards, while reducing our carbon emissions from energy production to zero”.
In many ways dystopias are easier to write than a realist fiction that can look at the awesome forces that are out of kilter on the earth.
Environmental justice organisations and networks (ERA, Acción Ecológica, Oilwatch) put forward the proposal to leave fossil fuels in the ground.
•Four energy policies can keep the 2 °C climate goal alive •Waiting on new climate deal ‘will set world on a path to 5C warming’ •The Burning Question by Mike Berners-Lee and Duncan Clark – review
An analysis of jet fuel alternatives that could be viable in the next decade.
•The War on Scarcity •The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View from the Future •Without Water, Revolution •Turkish hopes for a new beginning •The Stockholm Uprising and the Myth of Swedish Social Democracy •The Natural Limits Of Confronting Our Limits •Days of Destruction
With political strife and economic woes often taking precedence over environmental issues, what are environmental journalists in the developing world doing to get their messages heard?
The worst direct impacts to humans from our unsustainable use of energy — over the next few decades — will, I think, be Dust-Bowlification and extreme weather and food insecurity: Hell and High Water.
•Horror story •Gattopardo economics: The crisis and the mainstream response of change that keeps things the same •The Wrath of Capital: Neoliberalism and Climate Change Politics •"Twenty-Something" Entrepreneurs Return To Northern Michigan •The Economy Of Tomorrow Project
