The Green New Deal seeks to generate growth and reduce emissions. The problem is that growth and emissions are profoundly correlated. The Green New Deal thus risks becoming a sort of Sisyphean reform, rolling the rock of emissions reductions up the hill each day only to have a growing, energy-hungry economy knock it back down….
Read More about Jasper Bernes: Between the Devil and the Green New Deal
Ron Patterson writes: Jay Hanson was the founder of multiple energy resources or peak oil lists from the 1990s, starting with the incredibly popular Dieoff website and Dieoff list which looked at peak oil, population numbers, and scarcity. He was probably more responsible for starting the whole Peak Oil Awareness Movement than any other person….
Read More about Obituary: Jay Hanson, early populariser of the converging crises
“Most people aren’t paying attention. Most people have no idea what’s going on. Industrial civilization is already having serious health problems and heart palpitations. By 2020, industrial civilization’s going to suffer a massive stroke. By 2025, it will be in hospice. By 2030, it will be dead,” writes the anonymous author of Articulating The Future….
Read More about Thermodynamic Failure: Phase 2
From Down to Earth: The biodiversity of the Western Ghats, already under a lot of anthropogenic pressure, will suffer even more if the expansion of the Kaiga Nuclear Power Plant, goes ahead. That this will be done for generating power through a technology that has several alternative and much benign options is even more ironical….
Read More about Kaiga nuclear plant expansion: Expect body blow for Western Ghats biodiversity
Many of these battles were fought not because people understood how these projects affected the environment but because they saw the loss of their land and livelihoods as the loss of security and dignity. As a woman adivasi farmer succinctly put it, “I wish to be a farmer, and not a housemaid in someone’s home.”…
Read More about Indian environmental movements: Why they failed or succeeded, and the challenges ahead
Ruchira Petkar/The Wire
From The Wire: The Rs 3 lakh crore oil refinery project, planned by oil majors over an expanse of over 15,000 acres of land in Maharashtra’s Konkan region, if it takes off, will inevitably displace farmers and fisherfolk from 17 villages – 15 villages in Ratnagiri and two in neighbouring Sindhudurg along the western coast….
Read More about Thousands in Maharashtra are opposing what could be ‘globe’s largest’ oil refinery
From Ensia: Research suggests that at least 100 U.S., European and Asian nuclear power stations built close to sea level could be threatened by serious flooding from accelerating sea-level rise and more frequent storm surges. Meanwhile, scientific papers published in 2018 suggest that safety standards set by national and international nuclear regulators are out of date….
Read More about Just how prepared are nuclear plants for climate threats?
From The Independent: Capitalism as we know it is over. So suggests a new report commissioned by a group of scientists appointed by the UN secretary general. The main reason? We’re transitioning rapidly to a radically different global economy, due to our increasingly unsustainable exploitation of the planet’s environmental resources and the shift to less efficient energy sources….
Read More about Nafeez Ahmed: This is how UN scientists are preparing for capitalism’s demise
What started as an online protest movement against the hike in fuel taxes, France’s ‘Yellow Vest’ movement has led to the worst riots witnessed by the country in half a century. With six dead, 12,000 arrested, and the unrest spreading to the rest of Europe, it may be the world’s first ‘climate riot’ of consequence….
Read More about The Yellow Vests: Is Europe seeing the world’s first climate riot?
Luke Darby writes: A damning UN report says we have about 12 years to prevent climate change from wreaking havoc on the world. To do that, governments need to look seriously at the forces driving it. And an honest assessment of how we got here lays the blame squarely at the feet of the 1%….
Read More about Billionaires are the leading cause of climate change
From The Guardian: On the eve of the UN’s annual climate conference, many experts believe the world may no longer be hovering at the edge of destruction but has probably crossed a crucial point of no return. Climate catastrophe now looks inevitable; we’ve simply left it too late to hold global temperatures to under 1.5C….
Read More about Portrait of a planet on the verge of climate catastrophe
From Vox.com: “For a long time I was a climate change denier,” says William T. Vollmann, the award-winning American author, journalist, and war correspondent. Yet, he has just completed a sprawling, two volume polemic called Carbon Ideologies, which explores the ideology of energy consumption, and is addressed to humans living in a “hot dark future.”…
Read More about Carbon Ideologies: ‘The most honest take on climate change yet’
The recent Special Report by the IPCC was widely described as giving a stark warning about risks faced by humanity if climate change is not dealt with urgently. What exactly does this imply, and how reliable is this document? We present analyses by Michael Mann, Richard Heinberg, Ratheesh Pisharody, Adam Markham, Kevin Anderson and Padmini Gopal….
Read More about The IPCC Special Report on climate change: A dissection
William Nordhaus
William Nordhaus’ low-ball estimates of the costs of climate change and high-ball estimates of the costs of containing the threat contributed to a lost decade in the fight against climate change, lending intellectual legitimacy to denial and delay. The IPCC report, released the day Nordhaus got his Nobel, heightens the award’s absurdity, writes Eugene Linden….
Read More about The economics Nobel went to a guy who enabled climate change denial and delay
Building the world’s largest nuclear power project in an ecologically fragile region like Konkan, along with attendant concerns of the safety, an unsteady French nuclear industry, will pose serious challenges to the environment, biodiversity, health and livelihoods of lakhs of people in the region. Is the Modi government courting a nuclear Bhopal, asks Sonali Huria….
Read More about Modi’s other dubious French deal: The world’s largest nuclear plant at Jaitapur
We’re on track for four degrees of warming, more than twice as much as most scientists believe is possible to endure without inflicting climate suffering on hundreds of millions or threatening at least parts of what we call, grandly, “civilization.” The only thing that changed is that the scientists, finally, have hit the panic button….
Read More about David Wallace-Wells: UN says climate genocide is coming. It’s actually worse.
A Special Report on Global Warming has been released today by the IPCC, considered the international benchmark on climate change. Ahead of it, Donald Brown reviewed three independent studies which show that climate change is a much more urgent and serious threat than indicated by past IPCC reports, and examines the ethical questions they raise….
Read More about The IPCC systematically underestimates climate risks: here’s the proof
From Common Dreams: The forced eviction of the Standing Rock protestors is simply the latest chapter in a violent, 500-year-old history of colonisation against the First Nations. It’s also the latest chapter in the battle between an extractive capitalist model and the possibility of a post-capitalist world. For now, let’s remember this movement’s enduring lessons….
Read More about Memory, fire and hope: Five lessons from Standing Rock
Here are three leading observers on the world’s increasingly shaky energy situation. Minqui Li presents a through-going analysis of the global energy scenario from 2018-2050 based on the latest data, Kurt Cobb suggests that ‘peak oil’ maybe a process, rather than a event, while Chris Martenson issues a stark warning on the coming oil crash….
Read More about Special Feature: Three views from the global economy’s energy cliff
From The New Left Review: If fidelity to GDP growth amounts to the religion of the modern world, then Herman Daly surely counts as a leading heretic. Benjamin Kunkel interviews the preeminent figure in ecological economics, and the author of perhaps the most fundamental and eloquently logical case against endless economic growth that’s yet produced….
Read More about Ecologies of scale: An interview with ecological economics guru Herman Daly
