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Articles by Adam Sacks

Adam Sacks has been a climate activist since 2001 and is the former director of the Center for Democracy and the Constitution. For a while he kept a blog, Climate Chronicles.

Featured Article

Now that official leadership in Copenhagen has predictably failed us, for no agreement ever on the table was anywhere near close to what we need to salve the savage climate, what do we do?

Here, finally, is some good reason for optimism.  With proper care of ruined grasslands, variously called managed grazing, holistic management, or carbon farming, we can restore billions of acres of the world’s soils. Along the way we can pull all the excess carbon out of the atmosphere and put it back into the ground where it belongs — in forty years or less. We can return to our long-gone preindustrial atmospheric concentrations of 280 ppm, the atmosphere that made the climate that made the planet very friendly to humans and many other creatures. It’s a climate strategy where we have the world to benefit, at minimal cost and very low risk:

We can begin doing it right away (in fact, we already are), with or without government and/or corporate support. It costs nothing or less in the scheme of things.(i) For your local third-world family farmer, for your 100,000-acre rancher, and for everyone in between it will probably tu... Read more

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  • We have met the deniers, and they are us

    Photo: Adam D. SacksJames Inhofe.Marc Morano.Richard Lindzen.Bjørn Lomborg.George W. Bush. Names of shame, ignominy, criminals against humanity, against planet Earth itself.  Agents of the lethal delays in our response to escalating, accelerating, catastrophic global warming. Yet, as deniers of climate change, they’re amateurs compared to us.  Us activists, environmentalists, scientists, and certainly Copenhagen politicians. Even […]

  • Dispassion as the world ends: The absent heart of the great climate affair

    Photo: Adam D. SacksIn “The Fallacy of Climate Activism,” I suggest that we as climate activists are not telling the unadulterated truth — which seems to worsen daily — to the public.  This is one critically important reason we’re making so little progress in changing behavior and politics commensurate with the drastic acceleration of global […]

  • The fallacy of climate activism

    In the 20 years since we climate activists began our work in earnest, the state of the climate has become dramatically worse, and the change is accelerating — this despite all of our best efforts. Clearly something is deeply wrong with this picture. What is it that we do not yet know? What do we […]