Produce Less – Exploring Degrowth

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 emergencies are intertwined. Either we find meaningful responses to both, or we fail dramatically on both. (For more on this image, see It’s Time ) Our climate predicament has been apparent for decades, but last month, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued its starkest […]

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 government’s climate plans that have been adopted to date would put global warming at 3.2°C. But there won’t be any civilisation at 3.2°C, Tanuro said, as there won’t be enough food for everyone.

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 invasion of Ukraine and the sanctions on Russia that followed. That’s a lot of gas and, as a result, it looks like new LNG terminals will be opened in the Gulf of Mexico in the coming years. Hooray! The U.S., it seems, will be […]

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 Disaster Preparedness and Climate Change in Cuba: Adaptation and Management (2021) came out the next month. It traced the highly successful source of the island nation’s efforts to the way it put human welfare above property. This collection of 14 essays by Emily J. Kirk, […]

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 providing arguments for them. This article puts forward technical reasons for rejecting both claims and then considers the implications for the design of sustainable and just systems. It is concluded that […]

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 number. Whoever has the most energy-intensive computing power can make the most guesses in a short time frame, and whoever makes the most guesses likely will solve the puzzle first, and will be rewarded for their “proof of work” with one of a finite number […]

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 three hours (see video for Jan. 12 here). It wasn’t just the frank discussions of harsh climate realities and hard choices that the scientists put forward that made the hearing remarkable. It was also the desperate understanding that Ireland, as a small nation whose future, […]

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 climate change. The frequency and severity of extreme weather events — hurricanes, drought, torrential rain, flooding — is increasing, to the detriment of ecosystems, food production, and public health. Without action to protect the coastline from rising sea levels, up to 10% of Cuban territory […]