Subjects Archives: Environment

The following is the transcript of a speech delivered by UN Climate Change Executive Secretary Simon Stiell on 10 April 2024 at Chatham House in London, England.

You’ve probably heard people say, “It’s not the heat, it’s the humidity.” There’s a lot of truth to that phrase, and it’s important to understand it as summer temperatures rise.

As more people consume more energy, our society moves collectively further away from mitigating climate catastrophe.

Far from water-logged Bavaria, immensely worse destruction is bloodily wrecking two million lives, and with Germany, though so distant, deeply involved. Of course I mean Palestine, especially Gaza. For decades the media has distorted or ignored what has been happening there. After October 7th ignoring it was no longer possible, here or anywhere.

The Dayak peoples of Borneo have been fiercely resisting the encroachment of palm oil plantations on their ancestral lands for many decades.

New Mexico’s unprotected waters demonstrate how pollution, drought, and the climate crisis converge to harm communities.

Leading states that met to reduce carbon emissions are home to some of the world’s top 60 banks. Among these, US banks are the largest fossil fuel financiers, while London-based Barclays leads in Europe.

A CSE study of 6 mega cities flags concerns over rising concretization and loss of green cover among other things.

The New England Journal of Medicine reported the case of a Texan farmworker infected with HPAI H5N1. He suffered the hemorrhaging in the eye the cows he tended expressed.

It sounds wonderful. Politicians and fossil fuel companies love it. But more often than not carbon capture and storage (CCS) is raised as a smokescreen for something that will harm the world.

With scientists warning of imminent catastrophe, it is time to stop expecting our rulers to change course by persuasion; only militant anti-capitalism will work, argues John Clarke.

Record levels of heat in the ocean are causing once-colorful coral reefs around the world to bleach a ghostly white.

Between 2008 and 2022, land prices nearly doubled throughout the world and tripled in Central-Eastern Europe.

“I expect a semi-dystopian future with substantial pain and suffering for the people of the Global South,” one expert said.

The agents of such a holistic revolution to save Mother Earth are not simply the working class in a traditional economic sense, but also the ‘ecological proletariat’, a dedicated army of an ecologically conscious working class, writes Rana Mitra.

With Lima failing to tackle critical issues on global warming, Bolivia outlines socialist project to save the planet.

The Arctic region is warming at twice the global rate, leading to rapid melting of ice–some have even predicted ice-free summers by year 2034.

On 19 April, tens of thousands of young and oppressed as well as working class people more broadly will once again hit the streets for the next global climate strike with actions expected on all continents.

The wildfires in Canada kept burning all winter, and a new season is set to be catastrophic, as climate feedback loops accelerate disaster, warns John Clarke.

Five times in the history of life on Earth the corals have perished, swept from the board by conditions hostile to nearly all life. Each time, it has taken them millions of years to evolve anew. Each mass death of corals has been accompanied by the mass deaths of most other species, on land and at sea.