Subjects Archives: Environment

This article, by Alan Thornett, was written for the current edition of the Green Left’s publication Watermelon in advance of the Green Party conference.

The passenger pigeon. The Tasmanian tiger. The Baiji, or Yangtze river dolphin. These rank among the best-known recent victims of what many scientists have declared the sixth mass extinction, as human actions are wiping out vertebrate animal species hundreds of times faster than they would otherwise disappear.

Planned fossil fuel expansion in the U.S. accounts for more than a third of new oil and gas extraction projects set to begin through 2050, according to Oil Change International.

Long Live Weelaunee.

It is just four years on from the global mass mobilisations of young people inspired by Swedish climate activist and Friday for Futures (FFF) founder Greta Thunberg.

There are reasons for Libya’s ‘chaotic’, ‘dysfunctional’ response to the disaster. And to identify them, we need to look closer to home.

For the first time, an international team of scientists is able to provide a detailed outline of planetary resilience by mapping out all nine boundary processes that define a safe operating space for humanity.

The planet has been laid to waste, and society pays for the waste in both money and lost years of life.

Highlighting the climate crisis is not ‘alarmism’, as critics say. Big Business wants an exclusive focus on climate because it downplays the true reasons for alarm.

It is long past time we end our mad rush to burn the planet to the ground.

In 40 years, Amazon rainforest lost an area equivalent to France; at this rate, catastrophe is imminent, say scientists.

Corporate and capitalist forces are driving us toward civilizational collapse but institutional myopia and crass electoralism also play their parts in the unfolding planetary tragedy.

Scientists blame ever warming human-caused climate change from the burning of coal, oil and natural gas.

Under the capitalist model, urban planning lacks a holistic approach, leaving human well being and ecological needs as an afterthought, which will continue to have a degenerative effect on the environment and global climate.

Canada’s unprecedented wildfires drive home the harsh realities of climate change, in all their enormity. We are fighting an incorrigibly destructive social and economic system, but we are also, at the same time, engaged in a struggle for survival.

THE fossil fuel industry, particularly the oil and natural gas lobby, always has new cards. Earlier, the fossil fuel industry came up with carbon credits: We, the rich countries, will burn coal, oil and natural gas so that we can continue with our current lifestyles but “compensate” by planting trees in poor countries.

It seemed utterly absurd that, even as the Australian federal government announced its purchase of over 200 tomahawk cruise missiles—because that is exactly what the country needs—there are moves afoot to prune and cut projects conducted by the Australian Antarctic Division (AAD).

The Aug. 8 wildfires that devastated parts of Maui are the deadliest in the U.S. since the 1918 Cloquet fire in northern Minnesota. Some two weeks after the fires, the official death toll stands at 115, and authorities in Hawaii have released the names of 388 people still unaccounted for. Tens of thousands have evacuated. Over 3,000 acres burned in Lahaina and neighboring communities.

Clarke: The social and economic consequences of climate change will play out along deeply entrenched fault lines of inequality

The title of this week’s episode is taken from an article to be published in September’s Monthly Review. The author, Jason Hickel, talks to Steve about the topic in his third visit to the podcast.