Category: Less of What We Don’t Need

The change in marijuana laws across the US raises issues far beyond, “Hey, dude, we can blow a joint now without getting busted.” The racism that permeated the age of criminalization now lurks throughout the phase of decriminalization. The burgeoning business of growing pot raises the specter of corporate agriculture with its threats to human…

The ecocidal accumulation of capital threatens the very conditions of human life on the planet.  The Covid pandemic confirms this, insofar as the increase in zoonoses over the last forty years is attributable to the destruction of ecosystems. The global ecological limits of sustainable human development have been crossed in several areas (climate, biodiversity, nitrogen…

The United States is facing two grim prospects in 2022: one, that continued abuse of the ecosphere could render much of the Earth unlivable for humans and myriad other species, and two, that the United States’ current political drift toward autocratic rule could accelerate, dashing any hope of attaining a multiracial, pluralistic democracy. These two…

Daniel Tanuro argued that the energy transition would require an increase in fossil energy, and therefore an increase in emissions. So somewhere along the line, to balance the climate equation, we need to compensate for this by cutting production and transport. He suggested eliminating useless or harmful production, such as weapons production or advertising. The…

Introduction by Tom Engelhardt of TomDispatch: In case you hadn’t noticed, we live on an eternally well-oiled and well-gassed planet. Only recently, for instance, Joe Biden announced that the U.S. was going to ramp up the supplies of frozen liquid natural gas (LNG) it sends to Europe by 15 billion cubic meters in response to…

The September 2021 Scientific American included a description by the editors of the deplorable state of disaster relief in the US. They traced the root cause of problems with relief programs as their “focus on restoring private property,” which results in little attention to those “with the least capacity to deal with disasters.” The book…

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…

URLCryptocurrency mining is often characterized as an act of solving a set of complex equations, evoking images of a Red Bull-guzzling genius hunched over a calculator searching for the Bitcoin-creation formula. But actually it’s less about calculation than it is about trial and error — making guesses in hopes of landing on a random, 64-digit…

A remarkable mid-January legislative hearing by the Joint Climate and Energy Committees of Ireland’s Oireachtas (legislature) grabbed our attention as we listened from afar, here in the United States. Four eminent climate scientists made blunt, strong, urgent policy recommendations of a sort policymakers rarely, if ever, hear from scientists. Testimony and Q&A went on for…

Cuba, a small island besieged by the United States, is taking concrete measures to reorient its economy in the fight against climate change. It’s an example that the whole world should take seriously. Cuba may be responsible for only 0.08% of global CO2 emissions, but this Caribbean island is disproportionately hard-hit by the effects of…