Category: Less of What We Don’t Need
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12 economic growth myths and how to counter them
It’s essential that we stabilise the global economy. More people understand this every year, but corporations and governments don’t, and so we continue to destroy nature for profit. They’ve built up a bank of myths around the necessity of perpetual growth. Here are 12 common ones, and how to respond to them.
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Slowing and Stopping Runaway Climate Change
Slowing and stopping Runaway Climate Change We are in a climate trap. A trap disguised as normal life. It seems normal because we live in the trap, as I will show. Two problems afflict the US economy: first, runaway climate change, a challenge to humanity itself; second an income distribution favoring the rich. We can…
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Tribes and Greens Rally Against Uranium Mining Near Grand Canyon
On Saturday, Aug. 24, members of neighboring tribes and environmental groups gathered near the Grand Canyon to demonstrate against the reopening of the nearby Pinyon Plain uranium mine. An estimated 250 protestors attended. The people driving up to the Canyon from Flagstaff or Williams through piñon pines and junipers in the wide solitude of the…
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22 questions for solar PV explorers
Should solar PV evaluations recognize the extractions, water, wood, fossil fuels and intercontinental shipping involved in manufacturing solar PV systems? Covering land with paved roads, parking lots, shopping malls, data centers…and large solar facilities…disrupts healthy water cycling and soil structure. Should evaluations assess the impact of these losses?
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Oil Kills: Inside the International Uprising Disrupting the Aviation Industry
The Oil Kills uprising is highlighting that the problem of aviation is part of a bigger story of injustice — it is in fact a pillar helping to hold up a system of injustice. The air travel industry is contrary to the need to eliminate fossil fuel use; it is tied to the military-industrial complex;…
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We’re Getting Sick of Noise Pollution
Data centers are massive, boxy, windowless buildings filled with computer servers that process data and handle internet traffic. Those servers generate extreme amounts of heat, the removal of which requires powerful water-chilling equipment. That includes arrays of large fans that, in turn, generate a thunderous wall of noise.
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22 questions for solar PV explorers
Should solar PV evaluations recognize the extractions, water, wood, fossil fuels and intercontinental shipping involved in manufacturing solar PV systems? Covering land with paved roads, parking lots, shopping malls, data centers…and large solar facilities…disrupts healthy water cycling and soil structure. Should evaluations assess the impact of these losses?
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Power to the Patients: the Navajo Nation vs. the Uranium Industry
Recently, Congress has made three decisions that bear directly on uranium mining on the Navajo Nation: it banned the purchase of Russian uranium processed for nuclear power-plant use, except when no other suitable uranium is available; it discontinued the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA); and it approved $2.7 billion for development of the domestic uranium…
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From Growth Fetish to Post Growth
“Our society tends to see growth as an unalloyed good, but an expanding body of evidence is now telling us to think again.” My family and I spent 25 years in Washington DC. They were good years, and every morning I began with coffee and The Washington Post. The newspaper was a wonderful companion—and reliably…
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Restoring Nature Is Our Only Climate Solution
Climate change is a huge, complicated problem. Therefore, many people have an understandable tendency to mentally simplify it by focusing on just one cause (carbon emissions) and just one solution (alternative energy). Sustainability scholar Jan Konietzko has called this “carbon tunnel vision.” Oversimplifying the problem this way leads to techno-fixes that actually fix nothing. Despite…
