Topic: Less of What We Don’t Need
-
5 Ways to Start the Transition
Use less energy Eat less meat Cultivate your garden Plant trees Learn the Law of Limits Earth’s climate is turning against life in its current configuration. This is going to be bad for most creatures, notably us, which is fitting because humanity is the culprit. You probably don’t feel personally responsible. All of us in…
-
AMLO in office: from megaprojects to militarization
—
by
While hiding behind a mask of progressiveness, Mexican president AMLO is championing a neoliberal regime and promoting highly controversial megaprojects. Many on the left, both in Mexico and abroad, welcomed the new president of Mexico, hoping that his progressive rhetoric of a “fourth transformation” augured a new era of positive change in Mexico. Andrés Manuel…
-
How to Make Wind Power Sustainable Again
—
by
For more than two thousand years, windmills were built from recyclable or reusable materials: wood, stone, brick, canvas, metal. When – electricity producing – wind turbines appeared in the 1880s, the materials didn’t change. It’s only since the arrival of plastic composite blades in the 1980s that wind power has become the source of a…
-
How We Are All Climate Change Deniers
—
by
Our society and our everyday lives would look much much different if we were truly attempting to address the enormous phenomena that is climate change.
-
‘The Changes Are Really Accelerating’: Alaska at Record Warm While Greenland Sees Major Ice Melt
—
by
The climate crisis is rapidly warming the Arctic, and the effects are being felt from Alaska to Greenland. The northernmost point on the planet is heating up more quickly than any other region in the world. The reason for this warming is ice–albedo feedback: as ice melts it opens up land and sea to the…
-
The price of plenty: how beef changed America
—
by
Exploitation and predatory pricing drove the transformation of the US beef industry – and created the model for modern agribusiness. Meatpacking lines, pioneered in the 1860s in Cincinnati’s pork packinghouses, were the first modern production lines. The meatpacking mogul Jonathan Ogden Armour could not abide socialist agitators. It was 1906, and Upton Sinclair had just published…
-
Greta Thunberg Gave up Flights to Fight Climate Change. Should you?
—
by
For regular flyers, air travel is often the dominant contributor to their greenhouse gas footprints. With the window rapidly closing to limit global warming to a bearable level — scientists warn that the planet has as little as 12 years to halve global emissions to restrict warming to 1.5 degrees this century — it is…
-
The Well-grounded Tourist
[[{"type":"media","view_mode":"media_large","fid":"107","attributes":{"alt":"","class":"media-image","height":"270","typeof":"foaf:Image","width":"480"}}]] Venice. Photo by Wolfgang Moroder via Wikimedia commons. Travel is a wonderful thing. Climate breakdown is not. As in so many other areas of life, we have to reconcile that latter harsh reality with the strange normality that has briefly existed in the time of cheap and abundant oil. In a matter of hours…
-
A Green New Deal must deliver global justice
—
by
For too long the severity and scale of the climate crisis has been deliberately understated, but October’s release of the IPCC’s Special Report on the Global Warming of 1.5°c finally sent shockwaves into the populations of rich countries. The urgent need for action was clear with the world now in ‘decade zero’, when every decision…
-
Our problems are deeper than “capitalism” (and “socialism” alone can’t solve them)
—
by
Complaints about “capitalism” have become more common the last few years in the United States. This has been a welcome development. Anytime the collective perspective is widened, it’s beneficial to at least some degree. In a complementary way, calls for “socialism” have also become more frequent.