As you’ve been reading lately, there’s a new IPCC climate report out, the second of three. This report is from Working Group 2, responsible for studying “impacts, adaptation, and vulnerabilities.” In other words, what effect is climate change (“global warming”) having now, what impact will it have if we make certain choices, and where are we vulnerable?
Read more...The first major (white) American city to end its life forever following a Haiyan-sized hurricane — Miami, for example — will cause a collapse in American confidence in the future that will never return.
Read more...Yves here. One of the common frustrations expressed by the NC commentariat is that we spend a lot of time on diagnosis and not as much on solutions. I actually don’t think our emphasis on forensics and analysis is misplaced. Too often, people are uncomfortable with examining deep-seated problems and thus rush to devise remedies that are incomplete or worse, counterproductive.
A second frustration, which I sympathize with, is that many of the solutions recommended by economists to our current problems (income disparity, high unemployment, increasing looting of the private sector and government) is based on restoring growth, which will make redistribution and other measures less contentious. Readers correctly point out that more growth is a 20th century remedy, when the 21st century is faces with global warming (meaning an need to start containing and better yet, reducing energy consumption) and resource constraints.
Yanis Varoufakis addresses both issues in his outline of what he calls a “Green New Deal”.
Read more...What’s rent got to do with climate change? More than you might think.
Read more...We aren’t even surveying “the green economy” any more; that program was killed by the sequester. What does that tell you?
Read more...Gaius examines the connections between neoliberalism and the convulsions that climate change will bring to the world.
Read more...Climate change is a hard policy question to address because it pits those who believe in evidence against those committed to knowing as little as possible.
Read more...Britain endeavors to build new nuclear power plants to avert an electric crisis in 20 years – with the retirement of nearly all the nation’s installed capacity, as it falls prey to age. Is the United States is destined for the same crisis?
Read more...Listening to President Obama’s State of the Union address, it would have been easy to conclude that we were slowly but surely gaining in the war on climate change. Of course, by now, you should know that when Obama claims to have made progress, a reality check is very much in order.
Read more...Real News Network interviewed climate scientist Michael Mann, who has come under vicious and persistent attack by right-wing groups who decided to play a reductivist game and focus their attack on one chart Mann developed which became important in popular discussions of climate change.
Read more...A new report describes how hydraulic fracturing is posing a growing risk to water supplies in several regions around the country.
Read more...Here’s the scoop: When it comes to climate change, there is no “story,” not in the normal news sense anyway.
Read more...Wikileaks has thrown yet another wrench in the negotiations over the sellout-to-multinationals-masquerading-as-trade-deal otherwise called the Trans-Pacific Partnership.
Read more...Over the past year or so there seems to have been far more train derailments of cars carrying crude oil that have resulted in huge, deadly explosions, and it is not a coincidence that the oil in these explosions originated from the Bakken shale formation in North Dakota.
Read more...Among the big energy stories of 2013, “peak oil” — the once-popular notion that worldwide oil production would soon reach a maximum level and begin an irreversible decline — was thoroughly discredited. The explosive development of shale oil and other unconventional fuels in the United States helped put it in its grave.
But this assessment may be premature.
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