Topic: Less of What We Don’t Need
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The Air-Conditioning Debate Isn’t Really About Air-Conditioning
Jacobin recently published an article calling for a national and worldwide expansion of air-conditioning usage. In it the writer, Leigh Phillips, used the suffering of economically and ecologically stressed people and communities during heat waves as a rationale for doubling down on a technology that, at the same time it’s cooling the indoors today, is…
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Pulling the magical lever : A critical analysis of techno-utopian imaginaries
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A systemic critique of 'luxury communism' & other recent techno-utopias, both liberal and nominally leftist ones, from the leading-edge Uneven Earth blog.
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The Bayou Bridge Pipeline’s Entangled Hierarchies of Power
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Lately I’ve been struck by a picture of Melinda Tillies, a Louisiana homeowner recently featured in an article by Julie Dermansky in DeSmogBlog.* Tillies is standing in front of her house. In the background (not more than “25 feet away”) is a crane, its arm lifted, ready to plunge into the earth. Tillies looks into…
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Don Worster Talks About His Book ‘Shrinking the Earth’ and How We Burned Through a Whole Hemisphere in Just 500 Years
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In environmental historian Donald Worster’s most recent book, Shrinking the Earth: The Rise and Decline of American Abundance, he shows how the great windfall of land, resources, and ecological bounty (a "Second Earth") that greeted Europeans when they arrived in the New World five centuries ago dramatically altered the history not only of the Americas…
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Energy: Missing from the Nuclear Story
One of my first memories of watching TV during the early 1950s was ads promoting leaded gasoline for reducing engine knock. Little did I suspect the strange history of that gas. By the beginning of World War I, it became clear that the internal combustion automobile was edging out its rival steam cars and electric…
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Is Nuclear Power a Solution to the Climate Crisis?
Faith that environmental catastrophe can best be avoided by technological gadgetry rather than a change in social relationships received a big shot in the arm with the May 2018 publication of Energy: A Human History by prolific author Richard Rhodes. After completing 18 of his 20 chapters, Rhodes begins his exploration of nuclear power by…
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A Short History ofthe Costs of Military Air Shows- Squandering the Planet’s Increasingly Scarce Fossil Fuels for our Amusement
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Pilots from the US Department of the Navy returned from World War II flush with pride at winning the war in the Pacific. So, in 1946,the Navy established a base of naval air operations on the shores of the Gulf of Mexico where the Blue Angels began doing air showsfor the public, partly for recruiting…
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Yet Another Appeal for “Green” Capitalism, Annotated
The Guardian recently published an opinion piece by its economics editor in which he argued that capitalism can rescue civilization from the global climate emergency. Here is the full article, interrupted by my responses: Capitalism can crack climate change. But only if it takes risks by Larry Elliott…
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The Fires This Time and Their Implications for Ecosocialists
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Our job, as ecosocialists is to put forward a practical plan to slam the brakes on emissions, an EMERGENCY RESPONSE TO THE CLIMATE EMERGENCY.
