Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Two thousand eight hundred high-spirited and sunflower-carrying demonstrators—numbers estimated by the Richmond Police Department (RPD)—converged in front of the main gate to Chevron’s refinery in Richmond Saturday to demand that the oil giant address ongoing health and safety concerns, stop processing extreme crude like tar sands, and cease its political and taxation manipulations.
This much we know: The fossil fuels that power our economy take their toll, on workers, on the environment, and on those who live near areas of extraction, transportation, processing, and burning—which, these days, is a whole lot of people.
I suppose it wasn’t really until I was standing on the west side of Hoboken, New Jersey, in water and oil up to my thigh, that climate change really made sense.
Global Power Shift (GPS) is a planetary-scale project to spark a new wave of climate action around the world.
We’ve arrived at a dangerous milestone. For the first time in human history, as Amy Goodman reported this week, "the amount of heat-trapping carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has topped 400 parts per million."
A group of people will be walking through the Great Plains, along the proposed Keystone XL route, for three months this summer. We hope to make connections with communities along the way.
Tim DeChristopher, who was released from federal custody yesterday, is best known as the man who disrupted an auction of pristine public lands. But there’s more to his story than his role as “Bidder 70.”
What if, instead of giving Marie Curie and Alexander Fleming Nobel prizes for their life-saving work on radiation and penicillin, they’d been thrown in jail? Or, instead of being awarded the Grand Croix of the Légion d’honneur for his work on the germ theory of disease, Louis Pasteur was imprisoned like Napoleon on Elba? It would be perverse to return the favour of great, public works by depriving people of their freedom. Yet that is just what we’re doing in Britain right now. The contributions of the people above were remarkable, but how much greater is the challenge of preserving a readily habitable climate, and how thankful should we be to those prepared to throw their life’s energy and creativity at the task?
U.S. climate activists have launched a movement to persuade universities, cities, and other groups to sell off their investments in fossil fuel companies. But while the financial impact of such divestment may be limited, the campaign could harm the companies in a critical sphere — public opinion.
