climate change

Making the sustainability change

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It strikes me as very strange that we have known about climate change and the risks associated with it for many decades, yet individuals, politicians and business leaders are doing so little. With such overwhelming evidence, why do we find it so difficult to change? Change is perceived as hard. The unknown frightens us. We may be worse off than before, so why bother opening that door? But what if we changed our paradigm and open ourselves to a new realm of possibilities and potential?

Plundering the planet

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This weeks guest is Ugo Bardi, Professor of Physical Chemistry at the University of Florence. He specialises in resource depletion, system dynamics modeling, climate science and renewable energy. He is also a member of the scientific committee of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas, or ASPO, is the president ASPO Italy, and a contributor to the Oil Drum, the best energy blog on the web. He is the author of several books, including "The Limits to Growth Revisited”, his upcoming book "Plundering The Planet", and even finds time to write his own excellent blog, Cassandra’s Legacy. Our discussion covers the role of volcano’s, Georg Bauer, the father of mining, space aliens, and climate change.

What must be done to stop climate change?

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This background of overwhelming public concern helps situate the upcoming national demonstration in Washington, D.C., on February 17, against the building of the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline from Canada to Texas. If built, the pipeline will carry 800,000 barrels a day of highly-polluting tar sands oil, effectively dealing a death blow to hopes of preventing rampant climate change. The demonstration has added significance as activists attempt to draw a line in the sand and pose the first big litmus test for the second term of Barack Obama.

Shale gas, tight oil, and fracking – Feb 12

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•The Myth of “Saudi America”•Colorado Communities Take On Fight Against Energy Land Leases•Romania reverses course on shale gas•German environment minister: ‘we want to limit fracking’•Shale oil is no threat to oil producers•Shale gas distracts EU “action heroes” from saving the climate•Tech Talk – Future Bakken Production and Hydrofracking

A Presidential Decision That Could Change the World

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Presidential decisions often turn out to be far less significant than imagined, but every now and then what a president decides actually determines how the world turns. Such is the case with the Keystone XL pipeline, which, if built, is slated to bring some of the “dirtiest,” carbon-rich oil on the planet from Alberta, Canada, to refineries on the U.S. Gulf Coast.

Tomorrowland

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Winter is the rainy season in California, but I knew the previous four months had been very dry all across the Golden State, making people nervous. Water is life in the arid West. A diminished snowpack in the High Sierras has a cascading effect for anything depending on a watercourse all the way down to the sea. A lack of rain meant the land in between was parched too. Friends warned me that the country that I planned to see during my visit “looked tough,” which is code for a bad drought. One quipped “Maybe we should be called the Toasty Brown State instead.”

An interview with Michael Mann: “There’s reason to be optimistic”…

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The publication of the Hockey Stick curve almost served as an exclamation point. It occurred in the wake of the warmest year we’d ever seen in recorded history, 1998. But that recorded history only went back a century or so. We were able to provide a longer term context. The curve told a simple story. You didn’t need to understand the physics or mathematics of how a theoretical climate model works to understand what it was telling you.

Activism and protest – Feb 6

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•Radical activism has a role in speeding up corporate change •Rebuilding optimism of will for effective climate activism•State of Fear •Exporting carbon: Canada’s new asbestos? •A chat with the Sierra Club’s Michael Brune about civil disobedience •The new weapon in the battle for Hastings – the ‘granny tree’

Charting a new course for the U.S. and the environment

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After more than four decades as a leading environmentalist, Gus Speth is disillusioned with what has been accomplished. What’s needed now, he says in an interview with Yale Environment 360, is a transformative change in America’s political economy that will benefit both society and the planet.