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...Here’s the scoop: When it comes to climate change, there is no “story,” not in the normal news sense anyway.
Read more...Why the real constraint on energy production isn’t the availability of resources, but the cost of developing them, and how these neglected investment constraints have big ramifications for “peak energy” and economic growth generally.
Read more...The problem of who should bear the costs of climate-change-induced rises in flood frequency in coastal communities is difficult even before throwing in the not-trivial problem that is it also highly politicized.
Read more...Yves here. One of the big problems with the growth v. “de-growth” debate is how terrible our measures of productive activity are.
Read more...By Patrick Bond, a political economist at the University of KwaZulu-Natal School of Development Studies in Durban, South Africa, where since 2004 he has directed the Centre for Civil Society. Originally published at Triple Crisis.
An important article about one facet of the Warsaw Conference of Polluters 19, “Loss & Damage”, was published last week in The Star (Malasia) by the very highly-regarded political-ecologist/economist [and regular TCB blogger] Martin Khor (New climate deal on loss and damage). As always, the South Centre and Third World Network provide invaluable information, and Martin has taught me incalculable amounts since we first met in Johannesburg in 1990.
Read more...Yves here. It is not hard to imagine that the position taken by Ohio officials regarding what sure looks like fracking-induced damage to water supplies is being replicated in other states.
Read more...Fracking skeptics have been concerned about methane releases, since methane is a vastly more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. This report is particularly grim and calls the entire case for shale gas into question.
Read more...Yves here. The post below by Michael Klare is hardly radical; in fact, the Department of Defense has been for at least the last five years working on geopolitical scenarios that give a large role to climate change induced political instability, such as mass migrations out of heavily populated low-lying areas. So as much as Klare anticipates more and more popular uprisings, I’d anticipate that the powers that be are expecting them and are prepared to suppress them brutally. Thus the places they might succeed are in advanced economies with comparatively little police brutality in large cities (ie, where you’d have lots of media coverage which would constrain how harsh the retaliation would be).
Read more...Lotus F1 quietly drop AGT from their Official Team Partner list just after Naked Capitalism tells the world that AGT’s a scam.
Read more...Yves here. One of the things on our very long list of important issues we’d like to write about is the way Google, an unregulated information-screener, can dictate companies’ business models and keep information out of the public eye by how they handle search queries. Richard Smith give an example below.
Read more...Naked Capitalism notes that Carbon Neutral Investments, subject of a consumer warning by the UK’s FCA, has deals with Formula 1 teams McLaren and Sauber, Lord Heseltine’s publishing firm Haymarket, Newcastle United Football Club, and a host of PR and events companies, and wonders what the hell is going on.
Read more...Carbon Neutral Investments and the ‘recovery room’ scam
Read more...I’m generally very taken with Ian Welsh’s work, particularly two recent posts, A New Ideology and How to Create a Viable Ideology. He then continued with 44 Explicit Points on Creating a Better World. And I hate to say it, but the last piece was no where near as well thought out as the preceding pieces. What troubled me about his latest piece was its combination of confidence (as opposed to modesty and soliciting reactions and input) in combination with it having internal contractions and a lack of precision of language. But perhaps the biggest shortcoming was trying to finesse the question of governance.
Read more...