climate crisis
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Price cannot steer emission reductions properly
In my last two posts I argued two points: emissions pricing is less popular with the public than funding of trains, renewable requirements and other types of public investment and rule based regulation . And the public is right. Clean energy, clean industry and clean agriculture are fundamentally infrastructure. Infrastructure depends much more on rules […]
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Why pricing emissions is the least important policy
Last week, I documented that the public supports trains and auto efficiency standards and renewable requirements, along with other policies sometimes slandered as “command & control” over emissions pricing. This week: some historical perspective on why the public is right, and mainstream environmental groups are wrong. Historically U.S. infrastructure, the basis on which this nation […]
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The coming climate panic?
One morning in the not too distant future, you might wake up and walk to your mailbox. The newspaper is in there and it’s covered with shocking headlines: Coal Plants Shut Down! Airline Travel Down 50 Percent! New Federal Carbon Restrictions in Place! Governor Kicked Out of Office for Climate Indolence! Sometimes change is abrupt […]
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Can a number save the world?
500 marshmallows organize for climate action.Robert van Waarden / Spectral QIt can if that number is 350. That’s the safe upper limit of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere: 350 parts per million (ppm). It’s also the rallying cry of a creative campaign to raise awareness of the climate crisis and build grassroots support for the […]
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Contesting on occupied terrain
“I am open and I am willingFor to be hopeless would seem so strangeIt dishonors those who go before usSo lift me up to the light of change.” “I Am Willing,” by Holly Near There is much evidence to indicate that there will be a vote on the floor of the House of Representatives next […]
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Think of the children, or think of your ski trip: Two ways to tell the climate story
Forty-five million people go hungry or undernourished because of droughts and disasters wrought by climate change, according to a recent report by the Global Humanitarian Forum. Climate change leads to 300,000 deaths a year, the organization concludes, a toll that will reach 500,000 by 2030. Many of those who starve will be children. Of course, […]
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Industry spin on climate is still working on media
Andrew Revkin New York Times reporter Andy Revkin has a blockbuster story showing that the Global Climate Coalition, the main industry group that spent much of the 1990s seeking to sow doubt in journalists’ and politicians’ minds about the reality of climate change, knew all along that it was real and dangerous: “The role of […]
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Another 125 million?
As climate change impacts ramp up over the coming years, we have a serious choice to make. We can try to run in between the raindrops, or we can figure out how to build the equivalent of sturdy, innovative umbrellas. Millions more people, mostly living in the world’s poorest regions, are expected to be directly […]
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Environmental Organizing as Solution to Family Discord
This weekend, The New York Times Magazine ran as its cover story an article entitled “Why Isn’t the Brain Green?” (i.e. why humans don’t generally make environmental choices automatically, even though it’s good for us in the long term). And a front page Monday story in The Washington Post, chronicled how “going green” could lead […]
