Subjects Archives: Environment

The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change went into effect in March 1994. Yet, of the twenty-seven meetings that the UNFCCC has held to date, the most recent one, in Sharm-el-Sheik, Egypt, was the most inconsequential.

The death toll from the ongoing storms and flooding across California and parts of Arizona, Nevada and Oregon rose to at least 18 on Wednesday.

In 1996, the eight countries on the Arctic rim—Canada, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Russia, Sweden, and the United States—formed the Arctic Council, a journey that began in 1989 when Finland approached the other countries to hold a discussion about the Arctic environment.

We have to address the way that corporations create, shape, and control demand, leveraging the state as a tool.

Blame the wealthy, not the weather.

The study looks at the impact of 125 of the richest billionaires globally, whose carbon emissions equal those of France, or 67 million people, and shows that just the richest 10 of those individuals own more wealth than the poorest 40% of humanity. The average billionaire in the study is responsible for carbon emissions over one million times higher than the average person in the bottom 90% of humanity.

In 2013, Edward Snowden’s leak of documents pertaining to the inner workings of National Security Agency (NSA) sparked international revelations about the reach and unaccountability of Washington’s international surveillance apparatus. One series of documents that remain understudied, however, concern similar activities orchestrated by the Canadian government.

In a recent study published in Science, scientists analysed how the co-extinction of species accelerates the overall loss of biodiversity and predicted possible loss.

There is much more here than can be covered in a brief review, including interesting discussions of language, laughter, neo-mercantile capitalism, digital information and abstract nature, a correlate to abstract labor.

THE crux of the issue is that non-fossil, or even a low fossil fuel path, will need grid-level storage costs to drop by a factor of 10 times what they are today!

Disaster capitalism and crisis narratives are currently being used to manipulate popular sentiment and push through a set of unpalatable policies that would otherwise lack sufficient political support.

Natural flows do not respect national boundaries. The atmosphere and oceans cross international borders with little difficulty, as greenhouse gases (GHGs) and other fluids, including pollutants, easily traverse frontiers.

Capitalist and neocolonial fantasies are hampering a just transition.

The world as we know it must change. Humanity cannot survive under imperialist and capitalist structures.

Our immediate crisis is caused by a system that encourages endless growth, exploitation, waste and energy use.

We are very pleased to republish this important article by Efe Can Gürcan, Associate Professor at Türkiye’s Istinye University, which originally appeared in Volume 3 Issue 3 of the BRIQ(Belt & Road Initiative Quarterly).

Petro’s, Lula’s, and Maduro’s positions show South Americans are united about the Amazon; it may reintegrate Venezuela.

South Africa is set to implement an $8.5bn plan funded by western countries to transition from coal-based energy to renewables. The country’s biggest union NUMSA has warned this plan will only intensify privatization while burdening South Africans with debt and poverty.

A new study finds Greenland’s ice sheet thinning much further into the ice sheet core than previously thought, 100 miles inland. (Source: S. Khan, et al, Extensive Inland Thinning and Speed-Up of North-East Greenland Stream, Nature, November 9, 2022)

The action proposed by world leaders, their advisors, and corporate lobbyists at the climate talks (COP27) in Egypt are neoliberal, market-based, and focused on preserving a racist and capitalist global order. Introducing a collection of papers on the climate emergency in North Africa, Hamza Hamouchene, Ouafa Haddioui and Katie Sandwell denounce mainstream and top-down solutions for an environmental crisis engulfing the region, and continent.