Category: Biodiversity / Biodevastation
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A Review Essay of Jason Hickel’s Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World
Looking through the lens of climate change, Jason Hickel’s 2020 book is a powerful indictment of capitalism. Finished in 2019, and after quickly reviewing the deleterious changes taking place across the planet, he writes, “the only rational response is to do everything possible to keep warming to 1.5 degrees (Celsius). And that means cutting global…
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The Existential Threat of Artificial Stupidity
The use of enhanced surveillance techniques in support of fossil fuel infrastructure expansions has particular relevance to the artificial intelligence industrial complex, because that complex has a fierce appetite for stupendous quantities of energy. IBM was not alone in finding paying customers for nascent AI among fossil fuel companies. In 2018 Google welcomed oil companies…
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Solar Ends Growth
Sun shines, winds blow Plants grow, waters flow They’re all sunshine in the end Sunshine is the one great flow Electricity’s a flow Use it now or it will go Save some in a battery You’ve only moved a piece of flow We’ve been told but it’s not so The economy can always…
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Capitalism Created The Climate Catastrophe
The United States has been far and away the largest producer of carbon dioxide emissions since 1750. The main carbon emitters were all colonial powers, namely the US, Europe, Canada, and Australia, which, despite consisting of roughly one tenth of the global population, have together accounted for more than half of cumulative global emissions. Carbon-fuelled…
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Around the World in Drought
Carbon emissions have turned the planet into a heat machine. According to SPEI Global Drought Monitor, severe drought is now found throughout the planet. A recent Cambridge University study claims that since 2015 European drought has accelerated and intensified. In fact, the continent is experiencing the most intense drought in 250 years. Italy’s Po River…
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Paper Straws are not Enough
As the UK suffered its hottest-ever temperatures only recently, Amy Goodman, host of Democracy Now, interviewed Britain’s erudite environmental journalist George Monbiot July 21, 2022 about his most recent article in The Guardian: This Heatwave Has Eviscerated The Idea That Small Changes Can Tackle Extreme Weather, July 18, 2022. According to Monbiot: “Paper straws are…
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Mass Death of Sequoias Is the Harbinger of Earth Systems Collapse
Climate change is killing giant sequoias in numbers that portend ecological disaster unless radical action is taken to reverse the impacts of the climate crisis. Sequoias, once deemed “unburnable,” began to be widely destroyed by fire in 2015, and then in 2020 and 2021, California fires tripled in area covered. A climate change threshold has been crossed.…
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Breakdown of the Marine Food Web
For the first time, a significant loss at the base of the marine food web has been detected. The Scottish research vessel Capepod reported the findings in equatorial waters of the Atlantic Ocean. It’s a disturbing discovery, but first a look at the marine food web, starting with the lowest organisms: (1) phytoplankton — plant-like…
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Greenland Threatens
Greenland is sending signals to coastal metropolises around the world that it’s never too early to start building seawalls. These are not mixed signals from the big ice island. Rather, they are straightforward signals indicative of rapid breakdown of average ice thickness of 5,000 feet sooner than ever thought possible. Stating the obvious, it’s horrible…
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Will Egypt Drain the World’s Second Largest Wetland?
“With 35% loss globally since 1970, wetlands are our most threatened ecosystem, disappearing three times faster than forests. Wetlands’ services for climate mitigation, adaptation biodiversity, and human health outweigh all other terrestrial ecosystems.” (Source: Wetlands are Being Lost at Alarming Rates, Global Wetland Outlook, 2021) Sudd is Africa’s largest freshwater wetland at roughly 3,500…
