Subjects Archives: Climate Change

‘A brief and rapidly closing window to secure a livable future’

According to defenders of the status quo, the best response to our most serious problems is to let markets work their magic; government regulation of private business activity only makes things worse.

Michael Mann is one of the world’s leading climate scientists, who has played a pivotal role in establishing what is happening to our climate and the forces driving that change.

Sometimes the aching injustice of human-caused climate change hits you square between the eyes. A new fact rears up that is potent, emotive and incontrovertible.

Emotions are at the heart of the matter ❣️

Quentin Beresford’s book Wounded Country: The Murray-Darling Basin—a contested history, published in September 2021, is a warning. State officials, politicians and agribusinesses risk turning Australia’s premier food bowl—the Murray-Darling Basin, which covers 14 percent of the Australian mainland—into desert.

“Israel’s actions over the last almost 75 years demonstrate that there is very little regard for the indigenous landscape, the indigenous flora and fauna, the wildlife population, and the indigenous people.” – Zena Agha, Middle East Institute.

Or, the complex political economy of auto manufacturing.

Ecocide–the destruction of the entire ecosystem–is a real prospect. Its possibility has been well known to scientists since the 1980s, if not earlier. Every projection of its pace has under estimated the actual rate of breakdown.

KUALA LUMPUR: Many factors frustrate the international cooperation needed to address the looming global warming catastrophe. As most rich nations have largely abdicated responsibility, developing countries need to think and act innovatively and cooperatively to better advance the South.

Environment and employment two fronts on which India has been besieged in recent years. Unemployment since 2011 has worsened in the aftermath of the COVID-19 lockdowns. About 100 million workers lost their jobs with women and the youth being more adversely impacted.

Abby Martin’s second feature film is an anti-imperialist environmental documentary.

An international “coalition” of scientists and governance scholars launched an initiative on January 17 that calls for a moratorium on the study and development of a controversial climate-change mitigation strategy known as solar geoengineering.

A lively debate has ensued over the merits of the film, Don’t Look Up. People on the progressive side of the political spectrum have praised the film for its piercing honesty about the climate crisis which is communicated through the metaphor of an incoming, planet-destroying comet.

Governments’ planned fossil fuel production remains dangerously out of sync with Paris Agreement limits.

Chinese policymakers have been rapidly developing new climate policies even as major events have threatened to derail them.

Twenty-five years ago, “degrowth” was conceived by its proponents as a “buzzword” carrying a vague ideological charge: Serge Latouche and his supporters said they wanted to “change the way people think” in order to “get out of the economy and development”… Today, degrowth is once again being debated, but on the basis of more rigorous premises.

This year’s successes include Shell becoming the first company in history to be held legally liable for contributing to climate change.

How many minutes till midnight? Two different but related news stories give us a clue.

Pentagon documents estimate that 13,744 whales and dolphins are legally allowed to be killed as “incidental takes” during any given year due to military exercises in the Gulf of Alaska.