Photo by Ferdinando Scianna/Magnum
ENERGY
There is a problem built into our relationship with energy itself. Even if we ‘solve’ global warming, we face an older, slower problem. Waste heat could radically alter Earth’s future.
Read More about Deep Warming
ALTERNATIVES
New Zealand’s Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has presented a pioneering national budget where spending is dictated by the “well-being” of citizens, rather than productivity and economic growth. But as long as other major economies continue to prioritise growth, New Zealand may become a lone wolf trapped in an increasingly hungry bear pit, writes Jack Peat….
Read More about New Zealand’s ‘well-being budget’ and the unnecessary evil of economic growth
Development/Growth
From Great Game India: A global contest with at least 9 geoeconomic projects is underway in and around Asia. Regional powers are putting forward ambitious plans for building roads, railways, and other hard infrastructure across the region. A preview of a competition as wide-ranging as the region itself; whose long-term ecological cost will be incalculable….
Read More about Nine competing geoeconomic projects that will shape Asia’s future
CLIMATE CRISIS
From Logic Magazine: Despite the climate crisis, Big Oil is doubling down on fossil fuels. At over 30 billion barrels of crude oil a year, production has never been higher. Now, leading oil companies are forging a lucrative partnership with tech giants like Microsoft, building a new carbon cloud that just might kill us all….
Read More about Oil is the new data: How Big Tech and Big Oil collaborate
CLIMATE CRISIS
Hello. Allow me to introduce myself. I am a Carbon atom, writing in the hope that the intelligence operating here might be able and willing to come to our aid. In particular, I am acting on behalf of the many Carbon atoms – who are contently resting in peace, unaware that they’re in great danger….
Read More about A carbon atom’s plea
Bookshelf
Over more than 40 years, Vaclav Smil has grown in influence, and is now seen as one of the world’s foremost thinkers and a master of statistical analysis. Bill Gates says he waits for new Smil books the way others wait for the next Star Wars movie. Smil’s latest is Growth: From Microorganisms to Megacities….
Read More about Vaclav Smil: ‘Growth must end. Our economist friends don’t realise that’
Bookshelf
The task of explaining the wider issues associated with air conditioning is a daunting task as the weather gets warmer. In ‘Losing Our Cool: Uncomfortable Truths About Our Air Conditioned World (and Finding New Ways to Get Through the Summer)’, author Stan Cox shows how indoor climate control is colliding with an out-of-control outdoor climate….
Read More about Air Conditoning: The all-too costly feeding and care of a familiar beast
Consumerism/Lifestyle
From Ecohustler: Carnival Corporation, the world’s largest luxury cruise operator, emits 10 times more air pollution than all of Europe’s cars, says a new study. Carnival’s cruise ships emitted nearly 10 times more sulphur oxide around European coasts than did all 260 million European cars in 2017, a new analysis by Transport & Environment reveals….
Read More about Carnival: One corporation to pollute them all
Rahul Gandhi, President of Indian National Congress, along with Jairam Ramesh
ALTERNATIVES
“Carbon tax” is a tax on fossil fuels to reduce their consumption. A revenue neutral carbon tax is “the fairest, most effective, most efficient single policy tool in the fight for a habitable climate,” says Charles Komanoff. The term “revenue neutral” simply means the tax revenue is returned back to the public in some form….
Read More about Rahul Gandhi’s cash transfer scheme could be a revenue neutral Carbon Tax
Economy
“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
Bookshelf
From Global Research: Fundamentally, this book is a call to action. Author Robert J. Burrowes uncovers the critical role played by the global power elite in creating our present predicament. If we cannot persuade the global power elite to respond sensibly to that predicament, or nonviolently compel it to do so, humanity’s time on Earth is indeed limited….
Read More about Giants: The Global Power Elite
Development/Growth
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
Bookshelf
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’
ALTERNATIVES
Jason Hickel, Foreign Policy: Many policymakers have responded to ecological breakdown by pushing for what has come to be called “green growth.” It sounds like an elegant solution to an otherwise catastrophic problem. There is just one hitch: New evidence suggests that green growth isn’t the panacea everyone hopes for. In fact, it’s not even possible….
Read More about Why growth can’t be green
Steve Cutts
Consumerism/Lifestyle
“The worst thing about cars is that they are like castles or villas by the sea: luxury goods invented for the exclusive pleasure of a very rich minority, and which in conception and nature were never intended for the people”. So starts Andre Gorz’s justly famous 1973 essay which remains as relevant today as ever….
Read More about The social ideology of the motorcar
Conflict/Dispossession
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
CLIMATE CRISIS
Oil. The 20th century was shaped by it. The 21st century is moving beyond it. But who gave birth to the oil industry? What have they done with the immense wealth and power it granted them? And what are they planning to do with that power in a post-carbon world? The Corbett Report finds out….
Read More about The incredible story of how (and why) Big Oil conquered the world
Consumerism/Lifestyle
Reading about energy today, it’s easy to get the impression that our energy problem is a quality problem—some energy is polluting; other energy is hoped to be less polluting. There’s a different issue that we are not being told about. It’s the fact that having enough energy – quantity – is extremely important, as well….
Read More about Gail Tverberg: Our energy problem is about quantity, not just quality
CLIMATE CRISIS
In this keynote address delivered at the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, the Post Carbon Institute’s Nate Hagens discusses how our lives will be influenced by how we react to the coming era of harder to extract and more costly fossil fuels that will be combined with cleaner but less concentrated energy types….
Read More about Energy, money and technology – From the lens of the Superorganism
Mural by 'Green Flower'
Culture/Cognition
Most courses on energy deal with it in an instrumentalist manner, as if it were another substance that humans can tap and use for their benefit. Platform for Sustainability and Equity and Ecologise are pleased to announce an online course that places energy at the centre of all transformations— abiotic, biotic and in human society….
Read More about Ecologise Foundation course in Energy and Energetics of Nature and Human Society
