Subjects Archives: Environment

  • Energy treaty

    What you didn’t know about the new global treaty to rule them all

    A new report from Corporate Europe Observatory and TNI exposes how the little-known Energy Charter Treaty gives corporations the power to obstruct the transition from climate-wrecking fossil fuels towards renewable energy.

  • Its a pipeline (Cartoon by Ingrid Rice.)

    Canada’s dirty $20-Billion pipeline bailout

    Finance Minister Bill Morneau has proposed sacrificing Canadian taxpayers to bail out an uneconomic U.S. pipeline owned by former Enron executives.An opportunity for new journalists to examine BC’s historic referendum on electoral reform.

  • Recycling crisis

    Recycling crisis is capitalist business as usual

    Recycling isn’t complicated. Households and businesses separate their recyclables from the rest of their rubbish and put them out for collection. This material then is supposed to be sorted and made into new products–a small but important contribution to sustainability in a world awash with waste.

  • Sea Ice.

    NASA Studies an unusual Arctic warming event

    Winter temperatures are soaring in the Arctic for the fourth winter in a row. The heat, accompanied by moist air, is entering the Arctic not only through the sector of the North Atlantic Ocean that lies between Greenland and Europe, as it has done in previous years, but is also coming from the North Pacific through the Bering Strait.

  • Shell

    Shell ruling is bad for democracy and the planet

    TODAY’S ruling that oil giant Shell cannot be pursued in British courts for activities that took place in Nigeria is bad news for poor communities the world over—and for the planet.

  • Earth sinking (Image by Steve Johnson

    More than 15,000 scientists from 184 countries issue ‘warning to humanity’

    “Our mandate is that we take care of Earth and earthlings and human beings because we’re all family.”

  • The South produces epistemologically-based theory—it’s not just a provider of native experimentation

    A century after the Bolshevik Revolution

    In the world we’re living in, it’s not enough to solve the tension between capital and work, the ongoing crisis of civilization urgently demands that we address the tension between capital and nature, which is currently compromising the existence of life in our planet.

  • India river pollution.

    Imperialism is suffocating India

    More than a month ago we published an article detailing some of the fallout of the ecological crisis in the Third World. The article detailed a study published by “greenpeace” that had shown figures projecting 1.2 million deaths in India every year due to air pollution-related conditions.

  • Book Image.

    Criminalizing environmental activism

    Berta Cáceres, assassinated in her home on March 3, 2016, was just one of hundreds of Latin American environmental activists attacked in recent years. At least 577 environmental human rights defenders (EHRDs) were killed in Latin America between 2010 and 2015—more than in any other region—as documented by Global Witness.

  • Homeless after Sept. 24, 2017 earthquakes in Mexico

    The Mexican earthquakes in perspective

    Mexico suffered two powerful earthquakes in September 2107. The first, with magnitude 8.2 took place on September 7. With its epicenter off the Pacific coast of southern Mexico, it caused damage mainly in the states of Chiapas and Oaxaca. The second took place on September 19 and had a magnitude of 7.1, with its epicenter about 75 miles (120 kilometers) southeast of Mexico City, damaged the surrounding area, including Mexico City.

  • Money Tank photo: Military Mortgage Center)

    The bipartisan militarization of the U.S. federal budget

    The media likes to frame the limits of political struggle as between the Democratic and Republican parties, as if each side upholds a radically different political vision.

  • People & communities should have the right to control their energy future

    UK unions call for energy to be returned to public ownership

    The annual congress of the UK Trades Union Congress (TUC) has passed a historic composite resolution on climate change that supports the energy sector being returned to public ownership and democratic control.

  • World Map Climate Change

    This atlas maps the end of the world

    Today, “we’re cognizant of the fact that there is no future unless there is an ecological future.” That’s a reality one comes to see clearly after clicking through the digital pages of the “Atlas for the End of the World.”

  • Trump Is Trying to Make NAFTA Even Worse

    Trump is trying to make NAFTA even worse

    Many on the Left have been deeply critical of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) since before it was fast-tracked into law by former President Bill Clinton in 1994. Now, President Donald Trump’s current plan to renegotiate NAFTA is poised to make the massive trade deal even worse.

  • Students at Bay Point Middle school work on a science assignment in 2011

    New Florida law lets any resident challenge what’s taught in science classes

    Any resident in Florida can now challenge what kids learn in public schools, thanks to a new law that science education advocates worry will make it harder to teach evolution and climate change.

  • The trouble with geoengineers “hacking the planet”

    The trouble with geoengineers “hacking the planet”

    To be sure, I can actually imagine a world in which a small and strictly limited amount of albedo modification could sensibly be deployed as a complement to strong and largely successful efforts to bring carbon dioxide emissions towards zero, accompanied by successful deployment of technologies for actively removing the gas from the atmosphere. But that would be a world with a truly exceptional level of international agreement, fact-based decision-making, and cooperation towards shared goals. A world where somebody like Donald Trump can become president of a superpower is not that world.

  • Measuring National Ecological Consumption

    Which Countries Live Within Their (Ecological) Means?

    The information contained within the 2017 edition of the National Footprint Accounts, and especially its elegant publishing platform, will be useful to critics of the status quo maintained by the major capitalist economic powers. To make sense of the data critically, however, one must go far beyond the explanation given below, as root causes are […]

  • "Cementing Feet" in protest of the "Corporate Governor," Ganjar Pranowo in front of the Presidential Palace in Jakarta, March 13, 2017.

    Kendeng Against Cement

    Since March 13, 2017, over 50 local indigenous peasants known as Sedulur Kendeng, from Central Java, Indonesia, have been sitting with their feet in cement boxes in protest before the Presidential Palace. This is their second such protest in eleven months.

  • Billboard for the Metabolic Rift exhibition tour, a reimagined version of the iconic experimental music festival, Berlin Atonal

    Metabolic Rift

    A bibliography of work utilizing the theory of metabolic rift developed by Marx.

  • “Environmentally Responsible?”: “Rogue NGOs” Tackle Pacific Rim in El Salvador

    On October 20th, hundreds of people marched in Cabañas, El Salvador to voice their opposition to the proposed gold-mining project of Pacific Rim, a Canadian mining company. The anti-mining movement in El Salvador has been growing over the past decade and in 2007, under pressure from this movement, the Salvadoran government began to put restrictions on the burgeoning, foreign-dominated mining industry.