GST Original Articles
By Ted Trainer / 13 March 2022
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In view of the attention Green New Deal proposals have received there has been very little concern to assess its technical feasibility. It involves two major technical claims, firstly that renewable energy can sustain present societies at a relatively low cost, and secondly that economy can be decoupled from resource consumption and environmental impact. The validity of these assumptions is often taken for granted. Robert Pollin is unusual in... Read more
By Robert Hunziker / 05 March 2022
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The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has issued its direst warning of all-time: “Climate breakdown is accelerating rapidly.” Additionally, they readily admit to overly conservative predictions: “Many impacts will be more severe than originally predicted.” (Source: The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Working Group II Sixth Assessment Report, 2022)
The crowning blow of this heavy-hitting report is a chilling statement: “There... Read more
By Brian Tokar / 03 March 2022
Since the heyday of technological determinism in the 1960s, many authors have written eloquently about how developments in technology are more typically the outcome of particular social and economic arrangements. Some contributions that have significantly shaped my own thinking include:
• Lewis Mumford’s observation that inventions like glass and steam engines were first developed for mainly ornamental and ceremonial purposes (opening heavy temple doors in the latter case),... Read more
By Henry Robertson / 01 March 2022
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No one knows what the world will be like in 2050 as a result of the worsening climate. My scenario suggests that the worst effects will not be directly caused by climate change but by human-created conditions that make our supposedly mighty civilization fragile. These conditions include excessive extraction, production, consumption and waste from a growth-driven consumer economy; long, vulnerable supply lines dangerously designed for just-in-... Read more
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More Reading Recommended by GST
By Cayte Bosler / 13 November 2021
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The opponents view lithium extraction as the latest gold rush, and fear that the desperation to abate the climate crisis is driving a race into avoidable environmental degradation. The flawed assumption behind the “clean energy transition,” they argue, is that it can maintain levels of consumption that are inherently unsustainable.
“We want... Read more
By Roar Bjonnes / 12 November 2021
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The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) states that the only way to avoid climate collapse is to end capitalism’s perpetual economic growth model.
In a recent article co-authored by journalists and climate researchers, with content first published in the Spanish online publication CTXT, Progressive International reports that a “leaked draft of the third part of the upcoming... Read more
By J. Bordera, F. Valladares, A. Turiel, F.P. Vilar, F. Prieto, and T. Hewlett / 07 November 2021
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Policies favourable to fossil fuel companies have extracted our common wealth – our air, forests, land… – and put it in the hands of a small minority. Green policies are therefore bound to be redistributive at a time when inequality is soaring. One of the measures proposed to reduce the regressivity of carbon prices is... Read more
By Elizabeth Gribkoff / 25 October 2021
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With dozens of new plastics manufacturing and recycling facilities in the works, the U.S. plastics industry will release more greenhouse gas emissions than coal-fired power plants by 2030, say the authors of a new report.
Emissions from the plastics sector equaled that of 116 coal-fired power plants last year, according to the report out Thursday from Bennington College’s Beyond Plastics project... Read more
By By Paolo Gerbaudo, ROAR Magazine / 25 October 2021
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The current political era is best understood as a “great recoil” of economic globalization. It is a moment when the coordinates of historical development seem to be inverting, upsetting many of the assumptions that dominated politics and economics over the last decades. This moment corresponds to the “second movement” socialist economic historian Karl Polanyi described in his book The Great... Read more
By Ben Kritz / 23 October 2021
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The minimum energy usage attributable to Bitcoin activity, as of this week, is 43.8 terawatt-hours (TWh) per year, and its estimated actual energy demand is 176.83 TWh per year, according to Digiconomist. For comparison, that estimate is the equivalent of a bit more than 16 weeks of average energy usage in the entire Philippines (... Read more
By Becca Mohally Renk / 22 October 2021
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“That’s unbelievable,” my father-in-law wrote me from Ireland after watching me give a statistic-heavy webinar on the advances for the poor in Nicaragua since 2007.
“I know, right?” I replied.
“No, I mean it’s actually unbelievable,” he wrote back. “For cynical people like me, our faith in humanity has been undermined. The story of a government really looking after ordinary people is too good... Read more