Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
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.
With declining real wages, often precarious contracts, and stressful working conditions, parties that use communication tactics or promote policies that prompt strong negative emotional responses are more likely to attract voters then their more temperate rivals.
All the modern short-cuts (such as self-help, esotericism etc.) are tools that can give us an illusion of being free in an unfree world. Actual freedom is nothing short of genuinely democratic action.
Those promoting co-governance describe it as a new relationship between social movements and the candidates they help win office — a partnership in which activists and elected officials work to maintain a long-term relationship, closely coordinate strategy and advance grassroots priorities.
You know a satirical movie has hit its target when the mainstream reviewers call it “shrill” and “overblown.”
Truth isn’t political. If anything it is anti-political, since historically it has often been positioned against politics. Truth-tellers have always stood outside the political realm as the object of collective scorn.
We can choose to believe the future is inescapably set in stone, and thereby make it so; or we can dare to create an opening for a different future, and so give us all a chance.
Indonesia’s sinking capital of Jakarta and the surrounding areas have been inundated with rain, triggering landslides and floods that have killed dozens of people.
If there is a formula for the new demagoguery, there must also be a formula for confronting and overturning it. I don’t yet have a complete answer, but I believe there are some strands we can draw together.
Like most people, I hoped climate policy would improve, but years of infighting and adversarial politics have resulted in a dearth of climate action, where cooperation might well have yielded positive results.
One solution to this frustrating deadlock is to place the responsibility for climate policy at arm’s length from political actors. We need a Council for the Future, tasked with the long-term thinking that eludes so many of our elected representatives.
The fact that climate change is mostly caused by the rich and yet the poorest, who have done least to cause it and have the least resources to respond, will be hit most seriously by the damaging impacts – is uncomfortable. But it is important.
All alarms have gone off in Latin America’s democracies. Bolsonaro’s triumph in Brazil is the consolidation of an emerging global trend which uses social aversion to politics to establish authoritarian and often openly anti-democratic alternatives.
