CLIMATE CRISIS
From The Third Pole: For the third year in a row, India’s monsoon season has produced floods in the northwest/northeast, while south India has a rainfall deficit. The key question right now is whether we’re headed towards increased monsoon extremes, or whether global warming is causing shifts in the duration, intensity and frequency of rainfall….
Read More about What’s causing so many changes to India’s monsoons?Culture/Cognition
The short film Carbon focuses on global warming and takes a look at what the future could hold for us if we don’t act today. The Nawazuddin Siddiqui, Prachi Desai and Jackky Bhagnani starrer deals with serious environmental issues like Global Warming & pollution and their impact on our world. Watch the full movie here….
Read More about Carbon: A Hindi short film set in 2067
CLIMATE CRISIS
From Grist.org: Yes, we should be having the conversation about climate change and the unprecedented floods, and anyone who tells you otherwise probably has ulterior motives. But before we go there, we need to show the victims that we genuinely care about them. Could our shared value be the lives of those who are hurting?…
Read More about Want to talk climate change amidst floods? Show some compassion first.CLIMATE CRISIS
Here is the melodious truth of our times. Listen to it and get a crash course on our failure to accept what we understand but can’t internalise to enable change. A parody of Simon and Garfunkel’s Sound of Silence, by Parody Project. Mihir Mathur, Mihir’s Musings RELATED A black day for the planet: Trump sounds…
Read More about How he (you-know-who) ‘Confounds the Science’
ALTERNATIVES
Richard Heinberg writes: Over the past century-and-a-half, fossil fuels enabled the rapid growth of resource extraction, manufacturing, and consumption; and these in turn led to population increase, pollution, and loss of natural habitat and hence biodiversity. Our core ecological problem is not climate change. It is overshoot, of which global warming is only a symptom….
Read More about Why climate change isn’t our biggest environmental problem, and why technology won’t save us
CLIMATE CRISIS
From Climate Central: If greenhouse gas emissions continue on their current trajectory, parts of eastern India and Bangladesh will exceed the 95°F threshold by century’s end, a study by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has found. The findings raise the issue of environmental justice, as these populations have done the least to cause global warming….
Read More about New study: Extreme heat will hit India’s most vulnerable the hardestALTERNATIVES
From BBC: A recent episode of Newsnight, BBC’s programme on ideas, had a surprising guest: Anthropologist Jason Hickel, who went on to make a case against the lethal addiction to economic growth and in its place proposed “planned de-growth”. Hickel is the author of The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and its Solutions….
Read More about Jason Hickel on BBC: Our addiction to economic growth is killing us
CLIMATE CRISIS
What is permafrost? What happens when permafrost thaws? This animation, based on research by scientists at the Alfred Wegener Institute, answers these questions. Understanding this problem, and its connection to global climate change, is of vital importance at a time when the thawing Arctic tundra is creating massive craters and bringing back diseases like anthrax….
Read More about Permafrost – the Arctic’s sleeping giant: What is it, and why does it matter?ALTERNATIVES
Even when we question the personal impacts of modern technology, how many of us consider how our dependence on technology might be harming us? Or question the belief that technological advances will save us from our most pressing environmental and societal challenges? Richard Heinberg tackles this thorny issue in this brilliant essay and animation feature….
Read More about Richard Heinberg: Ecological collapse? There’s no app for thatALTERNATIVES
CarbonBrief reports: On the roof of a waste incinerator outside Zurich, the Swiss firm Climeworks has built the world’s first commercial plant to suck CO2 directly from the air. They claim that their direct air capture process –a technology often considered too expensive– aims to capture 1% of global CO2 emissions each year by 2025….
Read More about This Swiss company aims to capture 1% of global CO2 emissions by 2025
CLIMATE CRISIS
Joe Brewer writes: There is a reason only 5 men have the same aggregate wealth as half the human population. And that the Earth’s climate is ramping up for a phase transition that threatens our entire civilization. It’s because the 500 year old Global Architecture of Wealth Extraction is designed to produce exactly these outcomes….
Read More about Can you feel capitalism dying?
ALTERNATIVES
Ecologise has consistently driven home that humanity needs to prepare for unprecedented environmental, economic and socio-political upheaval and uncertainty in the 21st century. In this new series, we showcase free short-duration online courses that focus on these various emerging crises and possible responses. Created by the world’s leading universities, they offer a good starting point to explore these complex challenges….
Read More about Module 3: Water – Scarcity, Contamination, Conservation
ALTERNATIVES
From Vikalp Sangam: NITI Aayog has invited suggestion and feedback on its Draft National Energy Policy. Here’s the detailed response sent by a group of civil society groups. Also linked here is energy expert Bhamy Shenoy’s critique of the draft Policy, which he says does not reflect the crucial recent transformations in the energy sector….
Read More about Civil society comments on NITI Aayog’s draft National Energy Policy
A hyper-image of a lanthanum carbonate, a rare-earth used in renewable energy generation
ZEISS Microscopy/Eco-business.com
ALTERNATIVES
In this essay, a contribution to the‘Pathways to the Post-Carbon Economy’ symposium by Insurge Intelligence, the author argues persuasively that the much-hyped “renewable energy technologies” cannot play any role in solving the multifaceted global crisis of today; on the contrary, investing in them is a waste of time, effort, energy and, most important of all, scarce resources….
Read More about The global crisis and the role of so-called renewable energies in solving it
ALTERNATIVES
Ecologise has consistently driven home that humanity needs to prepare for unprecedented environmental, economic and socio-political upheaval and uncertainty in the 21st century. In this new series, we showcase free short-duration online courses that focus on these various emerging crises and possible responses. Created by the world’s leading universities, they offer a good starting point to explore these complex challenges….
Read More about Module 2: Energy – Fossil Fuels And Our Future
ALTERNATIVES
From The Guardian: In 2006, former U.S. Vice-President Al Gore triggered a worldwide debate about climate change with his Oscar-winning documentary, An Inconvenient Truth. Now, he’s back with a rousing follow-up for the age of climate change denial under Trump. Fellow climate champion and U.S. presidential candidate Bernie Sanders recently discussed the film with Gore….
Read More about Bernie Sanders and Al Gore on solving the climate crisis
ALTERNATIVES
From IEEE Spectrum: At the beginning, engineers at RE<C, Google’s now defunct renewable energy initiative, had shared the attitude of many environmentalists: They felt that with steady improvements to today’s renewable energy technologies, society could stave off catastrophic climate change. They now know that to be a false hope—but that doesn’t mean the planet is doomed….
Read More about Google engineers say today’s RE technologies won’t save us. So what will?
CLIMATE CRISIS
From Mining Review Africa: Environmental NGO Urgewald has revealed companies that are at the forefront to expand the world’s coal-fired power by 42.8%. The report identifies the 120 companies that are planning about 850 new coal plants in 62 countries–including Indian coal majors Adani, Tata, Lanco and Coal India, which are driving the biggest plants….
Read More about The Dirty 120: Urgewald exposes world’s biggest coal plant developers
Introduction to the University of British Columbia's climate change basics course
ALTERNATIVES
Ecologise has consistently driven home that humanity needs to prepare for unprecedented environmental, economic and socio-political upheaval and uncertainty in the 21st century. In this new series, we showcase free short-duration online courses that focus on these various emerging crises and possible responses. Created by the world’s leading universities, they offer a good starting point to explore these complex challenges….
Read More about Module 1: Climate Change – Challenges and Solutions
New York Magazine
CLIMATE CRISIS
It is not often that an article about climate change becomes the most hotly debated item on the internet. But David Wallace-Wells’ lengthy essay published in New York Magazine did exactly that. The full text of the essay –admittedly a worst-case scenario- which has kicked up a firestorm of debate online, along with selected responses….
Read More about Viral essay: The Uninhabitable Earth
