Subjects Archives: Environment

Let’s start with the total amount of radiation that the Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear power plant STILL contains today. The spent fuel at the site contains 85 times more cesium-137 than Chornobyl and 50,000 to 100,000 times more than the Hiroshima bomb. 

Over the northern hemisphere summer that has been dominated by floods, fires, and unrelenting heat, with temperature records being regularly smashed, climate scientists have become increasingly alarmed.

In a mind-numbingly irresponsible political gamble, British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak last month announced a reversal of the UK’s key climate change pledges.

THE Modi government, ever solicitous of corporate interests, has launched a plan whereby real estate developers and other corporates will be allowed to destroy large swathes of India’s forest cover for starting projects that rake in profits. It is amending the Forest Conservation Act to remove those forest patches that are not deemed as such by the government from protection under the Act.

Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek last week welcomed a UNESCO World Heritage Committee decision not to list the Great Barrier Reef as “in danger”. But what is “great news” to Plibersek is not great news for the reef. 

“Public schools belong to us, and we know we deserve better,” said a Sunrise Movement organizer and the youngest school board member in Idaho.

At least 75,000 marched in New York City on September 17, quite impressive, inspiring to be a part of. As compared to previous marches, last seen pre-Covid, there were more people of color, indigenous and immigrant participants.

PROINPA is a grassroots campesino organization promoting food sovereignty, endogenous seed production, and an agroecological transition.

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.