If we don’t “stop now” — meaning, hit the carbon brake hard and stop the carbon car — we risk going over a cliff whose edge could be as near as five to ten years away.
Read more...Yves here. While this post focuses on a newly-released Department of Energy forecast, and forecasting is always a fraught exercise, there’s good reason to see it as realistic. It reflects the power of inertia and entrenched interests. If anything, you’d expect the DoE to present a hopeful outlook on the growth of eco-friendly power sources, given how often Obama talks about “green energy” and “green jobs,” but the authors appear to have steered clear of undue optimism.
Read more...Yves here. Let me underscore that the source for this article is not a granola-head organization but the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which is one of the US national labs, or more formally, the United States Department of Energy national laboratories and technology centers.
Read more...Yves here. The 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech is ten days away. Brace yourself for the reminisces, most of which will be genuine, heartfelt, and insightful, while others which will treat the occasion as an opportunity for brand identification.
McKibben, a well-known and effective climate change activist, raises the question of leadership in movements to promote social change. He argues that the charismatic chieftain is out, and the model now is that of distributed leadership, with lower level “leaders” being more critical to movement success than ever before.
Read more...Perhaps I’m just having a bad month, but I wonder if other readers sense what I’m detecting. I fancy if someone did a Google frequency search on the right terms, they might pick up tangible indicators of what I’m sensing (as in I’m also a believer that what people attribute to gut feeling is actually pattern recognition).
The feeling I have is that of heightened generalized tension, the social/political equivalent of the sort of disturbance that animals detect in advance of earthquakes or volcanic eruptions, of pressure building up along major fault lines.
Read more...Philip Mirowski is the Carl Koch Professor of Economics and the History and Philosophy of Science University of Notre Dame. Professor Mirowski’s latest book is Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown
The interview was conducted by Nathan Tankus, a student and research assistant at the University of Ottawa. He is currently a Visiting Researcher at the Fields Institute
Read more...Yves here. Ilargi takes up one of our favorite topics, how the fetishization of numbers and measurement is at best misguided and at worst profoundly dysfunctional, as we discussed in a 2006 article, Management’s Great Addiction.
Read more...Yves here. This post illustrates yet another sign of decay among the ruling classes: that of not even bothering to go through the motions of following stipulated political and regulatory processes.
Read more...Yves here. Chris Hedges opens a new series on Real News Network by discussing how dire our current situation is, particularly from an ecological perspective, and the reluctance to acknowledge it and take corrective measures.
Read more...Obama has unfortunately been backed by a segment of the environmental and policy community that believes or wants desperately to believe that fracked natural gas is cleaner and otherwise preferable to coal. But it’s already too late for this and other “carbon gradualist” strategies to be viable.
Read more...There’s speculation on whether we are being prepped for a Yes to Keystone.
Me? I think we’re being set up for a Yes, but I’ve thought that since the subject came up. If the baby keeps grabbing for the candy, you have to conclude s/he wants it. Same with this.
Read more...By Gaius Pubius, a professional writer living on the West Coast. Follow him on Twitter @Gaius_Publius. Cross posted from AmericaBlog
We know that global warming will cause some crises, since the little warming we’ve experienced so far (0.8°C or so) is already a problem. But according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the leading scientific organization studying this phenomenon, this is only the beginning. What’s the temperature we should stop at if we don’t want to cause another world-class extinction?
Read more...Yves here. This post is the first in a series by Gaius. It starts by looking at the larger climate picture over larger swathes of time and showing what level of temperature changes led to mass extinction events.
Read more...Dr. John Abraham is a thermal sciences researcher and professor at the University of St. Thomas, in Minnesota who has straddled many worlds in his quest for answers to climate change, from working with the US defense industry to pro-bono work creating low-cost energy solutions to Africa’s remote areas.
Dr. Abrahams discusses:
Read more...• What climate change REALLY means
• How the Earth’s warming bears a human fingerprint
• How we can do something now about climate change, with today’s technology
• How and why the public remains ill-informed on the issue
• How Hurricane Sandy can be viewed from the climate change spectrum
• How the Earth’s warming has a human fingerprint
• Where the silver lining in all of this is
• Why Keystone XL will probably (but shouldn’t) be green-lighted
• How ‘micro-wind’ may be a hot seller in our renewable future
• How the future could see a merger of interests in the fossil fuel and alternative energy sectors
By Patrick Bond, a political economist with longstanding research interests and NGO work in urban communities and with global justice movements in several countries. He teaches political economy and eco-social policy, directs the Centre for Civil Society and is involved in research on economic justice, geopolitics, climate, energy and water. Cross posted from Triple Crisis
A secondary objective of the Copenhagen deal – aside from avoiding emissions cuts the world so desperately requires – was to maintain a modicum of confidence in carbon markets. Especially after the 2008 financial meltdown and rapid decline of European Union Emissions Trading Scheme, BASIC leaders felt renewed desperation to prop up the ‘Clean Development Mechanism’ (CDM), the Third World’s version of carbon trading
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