Category: Biodiversity / Biodevastation
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Stop Green Genocide in Cameroon
Clouds of red dust rise into the sky and hang in the air as the truck roars past. It’s impossible to breathe as the dust gathers in the folds of villagers’ clothes, settles on rooftops, and coats the forest’s green leaves. The next truck goes by, and another cloud rises up in its wake. They…
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Desert Solar: A Spectacular Fiction, Not a Spectacular Future
The colonial idea of solar-paneling the Sahara for Europe’s benefit is only deemed necessary because European leaders are unwilling to countenance a shift away from energy-intensive industry and capitalist systems of endless production.
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Manure Digesters: Another False Solution that Makes Climate Injustice Worse
My gut reaction 15 years ago to Vilsack’s manure digester panacea to global climate change remains true today—why pay to fix a problem that doesn’t even need to exist? Countless studies have shown that the most cost effective, eco-friendly, and often quite profitable form of animal husbandry—including dairying—is managed rotational grazing. If animals are just…
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Nuclear Goes Backwards, Again, as Wind and Solar Enjoy Another Year of Record Growth
Excellent update of nuclear vs. renewables potential, based mainly on IEA data, which has skewed pronuclear in the past but seems to be shifting. From an Australian ’new economy’ site.
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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…
