climate change

Sliding down the slippery slope: A truth too big for Obama

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Now, the good news is, we can make meaningful progress on this issue [climate change] while driving strong economic growth.” With that sentence from his State of the Union address, President Obama capitulated to paltry cynicism. Alas, he will not be the president who finally comes clean on the trade-off between economic growth and environmental protection. Obama is now committed to win-win, green-growth rhetoric.

Two Books that Shed Light on Our Present Predicament: Arcadia and The Dog Stars

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There’s no shortage of modern writers who are exploring our modern dystopia by, as someone has put it in a different context, “remembering forward.” Recently, I happened to read two such novels back to back, both quite fine and both illustrative of that something in the zeitgeist that makes our grinding apocalypse worth writing about. Neither is a techy, sci fi, plot-driven novel such as those of William Gibson or Paolo Bacigalupi, nor are they fully akin to sociological horror stories such as 1984 or The Handmaid’s Tale. They are less didactic than World Made by Hand or The Road.
 

Climate, politics & money – Feb 15

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•Sanders, Boxer Outline ‘Gold Standard’ Climate Bill •Secret funding helped build vast network of climate denial thinktanks •HSBC and Aviva back project to identify ‘stranded’ high-carbon assets •The transformational challenges of climate change: An interview with Professor John Schellnhuber and Professor Ottmar Edenhofer •Carbon trading has failed: scrap the ETS now •In historic turn, Sierra Club gets arrested for the climate •Fossil fuel subsidies and tax breaks are still rising •There is no such thing as climate change denial

Forever Groundhog Day for climate? A tale of ice, smokescreens and rebellion

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Just a few days ago, the National Snow and Ice Data Center, based at the University of Colorado in Boulder, announced that ‘Greenland’s surface melting in 2012 was intense, far in excess of any earlier year in the satellite record since 1979.’ Our future is melting before our very eyes… When significant parts of the corporate media are openly embracing and indeed pushing climate ‘scepticism’, is there any meaningful justification for this in the climate science? No. Geochemist James Lawrence Powell recently conducted an exhaustive study of the peer-reviewed literature on climate science. Going back over 20 years, his search yielded 13,950 scientific papers. Of these, only 24 ‘clearly rejected global warming or endorsed a cause other than carbon dioxide emissions for the observed warming of 0.8 degrees since the beginning of the industrial era.’

Making the sustainability change

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It strikes me as very strange that we have known about climate change and the risks associated with it for many decades, yet individuals, politicians and business leaders are doing so little. With such overwhelming evidence, why do we find it so difficult to change? Change is perceived as hard. The unknown frightens us. We may be worse off than before, so why bother opening that door? But what if we changed our paradigm and open ourselves to a new realm of possibilities and potential?

Plundering the planet

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This weeks guest is Ugo Bardi, Professor of Physical Chemistry at the University of Florence. He specialises in resource depletion, system dynamics modeling, climate science and renewable energy. He is also a member of the scientific committee of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas, or ASPO, is the president ASPO Italy, and a contributor to the Oil Drum, the best energy blog on the web. He is the author of several books, including "The Limits to Growth Revisited”, his upcoming book "Plundering The Planet", and even finds time to write his own excellent blog, Cassandra’s Legacy. Our discussion covers the role of volcano’s, Georg Bauer, the father of mining, space aliens, and climate change.

What must be done to stop climate change?

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This background of overwhelming public concern helps situate the upcoming national demonstration in Washington, D.C., on February 17, against the building of the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline from Canada to Texas. If built, the pipeline will carry 800,000 barrels a day of highly-polluting tar sands oil, effectively dealing a death blow to hopes of preventing rampant climate change. The demonstration has added significance as activists attempt to draw a line in the sand and pose the first big litmus test for the second term of Barack Obama.

Shale gas, tight oil, and fracking – Feb 12

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•The Myth of “Saudi America”•Colorado Communities Take On Fight Against Energy Land Leases•Romania reverses course on shale gas•German environment minister: ‘we want to limit fracking’•Shale oil is no threat to oil producers•Shale gas distracts EU “action heroes” from saving the climate•Tech Talk – Future Bakken Production and Hydrofracking

A Presidential Decision That Could Change the World

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Presidential decisions often turn out to be far less significant than imagined, but every now and then what a president decides actually determines how the world turns. Such is the case with the Keystone XL pipeline, which, if built, is slated to bring some of the “dirtiest,” carbon-rich oil on the planet from Alberta, Canada, to refineries on the U.S. Gulf Coast.

Tomorrowland

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Winter is the rainy season in California, but I knew the previous four months had been very dry all across the Golden State, making people nervous. Water is life in the arid West. A diminished snowpack in the High Sierras has a cascading effect for anything depending on a watercourse all the way down to the sea. A lack of rain meant the land in between was parched too. Friends warned me that the country that I planned to see during my visit “looked tough,” which is code for a bad drought. One quipped “Maybe we should be called the Toasty Brown State instead.”