Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Ferocious wildfires are raging across Southern California, destroying hundreds of homes adorned with holiday decorations and forcing thousands of residents to flee. With high winds expected to continue, forecasters are warning that dangerous fires could endanger the region for days. California is susceptible to fires year-round, but the worst of the wildfires aren’t supposed to occur this late into the year.
How serious is the loss of species globally? Are material cycles in an ecosystem with few species changed? In order to find this out, the “Jena Experiment” was established in 2002, one of the largest biodiversity experiments worldwide.
This begins a new series of commentaries on the impact the Trump presidency and the current Republican Congressional majorities are having on federal climate change policies. The emphasis of the series is not on executive branch actions to revise and rescind existing environmental regulations nor on Congressional efforts to amend or to abolish current climate-related laws—although these actions will be discussed.
In his article, Richard Smith calls upon his readers to “change the conversation”. He asks, “What are your thoughts?” He says, if we don’t “come up with a viable alternative, our goose is cooked.” I fully agree. So I join the conversation, in order to improve it.
The problem is, we live in an economy built on perpetual growth but we live on a finite planet with limited resources and sinks. To date, all efforts to “green” capitalism have foundered on this fundamental contradiction: maximizing profit and saving the planet are inherently in conflict and cannot be systematically aligned even if, here and there, they might coincide for a moment. That’s because under capitalism, CEOs and corporate boards are not responsible to society, they’re responsible to private shareholders.
Around the world, as governments shift away from the coal that fueled two ages of industrial revolution, more and more mines are falling silent. If there’s an afterlife for retired coal mines, one that could put them to work for the next revolution in energy, it will have to come soon.
The Agua Caliente case was the culmination of a struggle over nearly two-decades by the tribe of more than 400 members to ensure that their sole water source remains as clean as it was when Europeans first came to the arid region on the borders of the Mojave and Sonoran deserts.
The growing effects of climate change, including climbing global temperatures and rising sea levels, are forecast to have an increasing economic impact on state and local governments in the United States. “This will be a growing negative credit factor for issuers without sufficient adaptation and mitigation strategies,” Moody’s noted in a statement released in conjunction with the report.
The glaciers of Pine Island Bay are two of the largest and fastest-melting in Antarctica. (A Rolling Stone feature earlier this year dubbed Thwaites “The Doomsday Glacier.”) Together, they act as a plug holding back enough ice to pour 11 feet of sea-level rise into the world’s oceans — an amount that would submerge every coastal city on the planet. For that reason, finding out how fast these glaciers will collapse is one of the most important scientific questions in the world today.
A group of 15,000 scientists have come together to issue a dire “second notice” to humanity, 25 years after a group of scientists issued the “first notice” warning the world about climate change. We speak with the co-author of this report, Kevin Anderson, one of the world’s leading climate scientists.
On the last day of the United Nations climate summit in Bonn, Germany, we get a wrap-up on negotiations. This year is the first COP since President Trump vowed to pull the United States out of the landmark 2015 Paris climate deal, a process which takes four years.
COP23, the second “conference of the parties” since the Paris Agreement was struck in 2015, promised to be a somewhat technical affair as countries continued to negotiate the finer details of how the agreement will work from 2020 onwards.
