Climate scientists are understating their findings to a significant degree. “Least drama” might be too kind a characterization. “Self censorship” might be closer to the mark.
Read more...If we came to our senses, however, and removed our soot coated “cost goggles”, we’d see the most obvious and simple thing
Read more...Height in England before World War II was seen as a class marker. But is that the whole story?
Read more...The debate on whether to frack or not, whether to build the Keystone pipeline or not, focuses on jobs v. environment. But this conventional framing looks past the fact that there are other ways to create jobs, and even worse, the role of government corruption in covering up the environmental costs.
Read more...Adam Smith’s work ethic is for robots, no? Who needs it? So, optimism!
Read more...Yves here. This is a day-late Earth Day post, but the proper stewardship of this planet is a 365-day-a-year duty. Ilargi focuses on one of my pet issues, that too many of the remedies for climate change (and environmental protection generally) rely on the illusion of new technology eliminating or blunting the need for lifestyle changes.
Read more...BP and the Government Decided to Temporarily Hide the Oil by Sinking It with Toxic Chemicals … The Gulf Ecosystem Is Now Paying the Price
Read more...When will the global warming process, and all the damage it does, get out of control?
Read more...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.
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