Poverty and the Environment
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Beautiful struggle: Martin Luther King and the fight for the environment
On the anniversary of King's birthday, we search for common ground between those who fight to save wild places, and those fighting for their lives in the cold city streets.
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Does pollution lock people into a cycle of poverty?
The EPA is funding grants to study environmental injustice and the effects of poverty and environment on health.
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A new sound, a new economy
People often ask me what the environment has to do with poverty and why communities of color are getting so active in the fight against climate change. Earlier this week, Green For All released a video that gets to the heart of the matter. A New Sound communicates both the pain of the old economy […]
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A tour through Indian energy projects suggests small is beautiful
A local irrigation project in southern India.Courtesy Michael Foley Photography via FlickrGeorge Black has a fascinating story about how India might lift its people out of poverty without torching the environment in the current issue of OnEarth, the magazine run by the Natural Resources Defense Council. Written largely as a travelogue through clean energy innovations […]
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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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A plan to jumpstart the global economy, defuse terrorism, and restore America’s world standing
America has lost its stature as a moral leader in today’s world. The global financial system continues to unravel with devastating consequences. The escalating threat of terrorism, driven by persistent inequity between the world’s rich and poor, seems immune to military solutions. The global climate stands at the threshold of runaway changes. What […]
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Umbra advises on population
Q. Dear Umbra, You once replied to a request for some simple things all environmentally concerned individuals should do by pointing them toward some “Top Ten lists” for eco-minded people. Without a doubt, hands down, the number 1 action that should be followed for anyone concerned with the environment is to limit your procreation to […]
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Water too often overlooked in development efforts, U.N. report says
ISTANBUL — Fresh water and money have one thing in common: Their mismanagement has left billions of people without ready access to either, according to policymakers, non-governmental agencies and activists attending the World Water Forum here this week. AquaFed’s Gerard Payen (Courtesy U.N.) It was one of the few things all parties seem to agree […]
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Economics malpractice, climate and poverty, oil sands nightmares, and more WSJ dipshittery
• Max Schulz demonstrates how economics is typically used in the energy debate: "There's an unavoidable problem with renewable-energy technologies: From an economic standpoint, they're big losers." As though the "economic standpoint" is some static, univocal thing. Douchebag.
• A nice report from Brookings on a woefully under discussed topic: Double Jeopardy: What the Climate Crisis Means for the Poor.
• National Geographic has an in-depth examination of the horror that is Alberta's oil sands program. Excellent journalism, albeit the stuff of nightmares.
• Shockingly, the oil and gas industry opposes the Obama administration plan to eliminate some taxpayers subsidies for the oil and gas industry.
• A while back, Holman Jenkins, a Wall Street Journal columnist and member of the editorial board, characterized Obama's concern over climate change as a "soppy indulgence," and said of climate science: "We don't really have the slightest idea how an increase in the atmosphere's component of CO2 is impacting our climate, though the most plausible indication is that the impact is too small to untangle from natural variability." Stuart Gaffin, an actual climate scientist at Columbia University, responded in a blog post, pointing to actual science. In turn, Jenkins retrenched in a blog post of his own, with a bunch of absurd harumphing and misdirection. Gaffin responded again, decimating the smoldering remains of Jenkins argument with a torrent of scientific citations.
This is typical of many other exchanges between ideologues and scientists about climate. The galling thing, with this one as with most of them, is that the scientists are correct, by any reasonable assessment, and yet the ideologues can just go on saying whatever they want, in widely read editorials. There simply is no winning here. It's really hard to see what the scientists should do.