Albert Bates

All told, according to the International Energy Agency, the net income for the world’s fossil producers is set to double in 2022 from 2021, to a new high of $4 trillion. This is the best possible time for the check to arrive at the table.

Coronavirus is hitting México hard and the government is in denial. México is going to have to face some difficult choices soon. It needs to remember what its indigenous ancestors did when the climate changed, civil collapse came, or invasion threatened. They dispersed and downsized… They self-isolated. And because of that, they are still here today.

Having lived through the Vietnam, antinuclear, and antiwar protest era of the past half-century, I thought that protest was a fool’s errand. I am here today to say I was wrong.
Turns out McKibben was right, albeit only by an unexpected turn of events. Protests are bringing the beast to heel, and the key battleground came not in Washington or Paris but to a lonely field in South Dakota, not very far from Wounded Knee. It was the young water keepers that killed the dinosaur.

Draft Agreement 1/CP.25, for instance, calls for all Parties to revise and enhance their Nationally Determined Commitments — their mitigation and adaptation intentions — by October 2020. Regrettably, the draft is not framed as a mandate, merely as advice.

I am in the middle of things here at #COP25Madrid where delegates from nearly 200 countries are gathered to dicker and dither about whether they will save the world, or just let it get hotter.

The simple truth of it is, there is no way out of our climate emergency without an emergency committee to organize a coordinated global response. You might say the United Nations is a poor choice for that role and I would agree, except that all the other choices are far worse.