Category: Less of What We Don’t Need

Many environmentalists are thrilled with the IRA; others less so. Those in the more critical camp have pointed disapprovingly to the bill’s promotion of nuclear, and note that, in order to gain Senator Joe Manchin’s vote, Democrats agreed to streamline oil and gas pipeline approvals in a separate bill. In effect, the government will be…

An understanding of the great extent to which we have overshot sustainability limits leaves no alternative to working for an eventual transition to mostly small, highly self-sufficient and self-governing cooperative communities controlling local economies and embracing materially simple lifestyles and systems. These can enable a higher quality of life than rich countries have now, without…

The same industries that benefit from ecological destruction- Big Oil, Big Agriculture, Tech Giants, the Military Industrial Complex– have for years tried to sell us a “greener capitalism” as a solution to the crisis. And they have been lying to us. Suggesting that individual consumption habits– light bulbs, electric cars, or the purchasing of carbon…

Recent polls suggest that the bonkers, even barbaric, rhetoric coming from far-right MAGA candidates could be undermining Republicans’ chances of capturing both chambers of Congress in November. Now, the greater danger may lie down-ballot. If extremists win key offices in swing-state governments in 2022, they might manage to award their states’ Electoral College votes to…

R ecent data shows that between 2019 and 2021, life expectancy (LE) in the US plunged almost three years while for Cuba it edged up 0.2 years. Yet, in 1960, the year after its revolution, Cuba had a LE of 64.2 years, lower by 5.6 years than that in the US (69.8 years). As I…

Jackson is 82.5% Black, and has been hit with multiple water crises in recent months.  As of September 2, the vast majority of the residents of the city of Jackson, Mississippi—over 150,000—still have no access to safe drinking water. The Jackson water crisis began on August 30 when flooding caused the pumps at the main…

Geothermal, like hydroelectric dams, is often cited as a renewable energy source, since the technology harnesses heat from the earth to produce electricity, which in theory is endless. Even so, large geothermal plants consume a lot of land and spit out a lot of water. The Dixie Meadows project, which was proposed in Nevada, was…

This, to me, is a fair inquiry. If a Republican introduced a piece of legislation that included opening up 600 million acres of oil and gas leasing in the Gulf of Mexico, dedicated billions of dollars to unproven “false climate solutions” like so called carbon capture and sequestration, extended the life of aging nuclear power…

While Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine [and Western sanctions on Russia] has exacerbated this crisis, climate change and capitalism are the primary engines behind this global food emergency.  The IPCC has estimated that by 2030, global warming will have diminished the world’s average agricultural production by more than a fifth.  This process really took…