Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
They say a picture is worth a thousand words. The thousand words of the lead image have to do with how differently Democrats and Republicans in Congress view the relationship of the current coronavirus contagion and the other great existential threat to the nation — climate change.
The logical endpoint then is to leverage the word cataclysm in these times, because only that word captures the magnitude with which our species is fundamentally altering the world in ways that will have profound, lasting, and potentially fatal impacts for humanity as a whole.
This has been a long tour through the Wonderland of fake solutions to climate change, ideas designed to splash a coat of green paint on Business As Usual so that certain private interests can keep getting richer…and so the rest of us need not be bothered with changing our habits or lifestyle. This won’t do.
Geoengineering refers to proposals for solving the problem of climate change, not by mitigation—that is, reducing emissions and deforestation, the causes of global heating—but instead by the use of new technologies.
Estimations for the percentage of greenhouse gases emitted by the buildings sector vary wildly. But any assessment should include both the embodied energy involved in constructing new buildings and the energy costs of heating, cooling and lighting buildings.
The heart of the conflict between real solutions and false ones is no different here than with other sectors. The false solutions in each sector are aimed at maintaining current power relations. The real ones are aimed at rescuing ecosystems and leading to a better world for all humans and other life forms.
This book is focused primarily on domestic climate policy, because neither we as individuals nor our government can, with a straight face, presume to advise the wider world on climate issues unless we ourselves have at least started the journey toward life within ecological boundaries.
The environment, health and economic development are intertwined. What’s happening in remote villages on a Southeast Asian island holds lessons for how all nations can better prepare for the next global shock.
There is no time left for barking up one wrong tree after another; no time to waste in false solutions. Hence this series pointing out the fallacies behind such proposals as electrifying everything, carbon trading, geoengineering or switching to “gas—the clean energy fuel!”
This fundamental question is the one I ask myself in my research, as an ecological economist. What are the physical things (like energy, materials, infrastructure and so on) we need to live well? To answer it, we must understand what we truly need, and how satisfying our needs connects to well-being.
The next several months could bring hurricanes, floods and fire, on top of the pandemic currently raging through the country. How do you shelter in place during an evacuation?
There is one major distinction between the coronavirus and climate change. The coronavirus may, in time, level off, after a record number of deaths and a body blow to our economy. But the effects of climate change are not reversible.
