Is there a way forward?
The threat to democracy is recognized, and the fight for a democratic future is joined. All is not lost, but it is already a close call.
The threat to democracy is recognized, and the fight for a democratic future is joined. All is not lost, but it is already a close call.
It’s essential to understand that knowledge is power, to have a solid analytical framework with the right guiding questions, and to work with others to share the significant costs involved in becoming deeply informed.
As I sit down to write this, April 15, 2023, it is 111 years to the day since the RMS Titanic sank beneath the waves of the North Atlantic.
We’ll need a much deeper analysis of both elite opposition and the strategies and tactics employed by social movements, however, to effectively plan to overcome political barriers to the transition.
On this episode, Nate is joined by climate science fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson to discuss how he contributes to the discussion of climate and pro-social changemaking through writing.
What credence should be given to the most recent summary report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)? To do that, you need to separate the science from the politics that pervades the IPCC processes.
Do I think we save the world with one last COP? Perhaps yes, if we do it together.
The way we frame climate change has significant implications for what feasibility constraints, trade-offs, assumptions, and opportunities we pay attention to, and ultimately what targets we set and the policies we design to achieve them.
In summary, emissions still have not peaked and are unlikely to be significantly lower in 2030 than 2020; warming of 1.5°C is likely this decade; and the emissions trend and reduction commitments are currently nowhere near keeping warming to 2°C.
Perhaps sooner than most think, there should come a point when public demand in the United States for corrective action to free us from fossil fuels is sufficiently intense that, if Congress and a unified NGO community are prepared, then at that point decisive, major legislative action could finally be possible.
With two world summits on the global environment at the end of last year – COP27 and COP15 – there should have been the prospect of an immediate impact on the looming disaster of climate breakdown.