Topic: Less of What We Don’t Need
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Not Hot Enough: Can Renewable Energy Build a Renewable Energy Economy?
Renewable electricity is booming. Wind electricity is now the cheapest kind there is. Solar power, even when combined with storage batteries to function when the sun doesn’t shine, can be had on the wholesale markets at a price competitive with natural gas, the cheapest fossil fuel. Suddenly it looks like we really can get 100%…
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The “100% Renewable” Dream Will Require Producing Less Energy and More Energy Justice
. At the heart of America’s mainstream climate movement lies a contradiction. On the one hand, the movement raises alarms about the looming eco-dystopia that grows more menacing by the day. In just the past two months, supercharged wildfires and hurricanes have laid waste to vulnerable communities from the West Coast through the Sunbelt to…
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The Genocide of the Rohingya: Big Oil, Failed Democracy and False Prophets
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To a certain extent, Aung San Suu Kyi is a false prophet. Glorified by the west for many years, she was made a ‘democracy icon’ because she opposed the same forces in her country, Burma, at the time as the US-led western coalition that was isolating Rangoon for its alliance with China. Aung San Suu…
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Are Driverless Cars a Good Way to Help Stop Greenhouse Warming, or Is Greenhouse Warming a Good Pretext for Selling Driverless Cars?
The more convenient and efficient autonomous electric cars turn out to be, the worse their impact on greenhouse emissions The automakers and IT giants are predicting that autonomous vehicles (AVs or “driverless cars”) will play a big role in reducing America’s currently extravagant emissions of greenhouse gases. In this claim (as in the assertion that…
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Digging Free of Poverty
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On March 8, 2012, a few hundred marchers set out from Pangui, Ecuador, a town in the southeastern Amazon, near the construction site of the massive, open-pit Mirador Mine. Just days earlier, a consortium of Chinese state-owned companies had signed a contract to exploit the mine’s copper reserves, the first agreement of its kind in…
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Why Climate Change Isn’t Our Biggest Environmental Problem, and Why Technology Won’t Save Us
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Our core ecological problem is not climate change. It is overshoot, of which global warming is a symptom. Overshoot is a systemic issue. Over the past century-and-a-half, enormous amounts of cheap energy from fossil fuels enabled the rapid growth of resource extraction, manufacturing, and consumption; and these in turn led to population increase, pollution, and…
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An Overview Of Nuclear Power In The Context Of Additional Capacity To Kaiga NPP
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The decision by the govt. of India in May 2017 to commission ten nuclear power reactors of the type PHWR of 700 MW capacity each in different parts of the country, and the proposal to add four more reactors of the type VVER of 1,000 MW capacity each at Kudankulam Nuclear Power Project (NPP), has…
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Miami’s close call may make climate-blind real-estate developers even more reckless
Miami Beach, where despite dark forebodings, a real estate boom continues Whatever price tags are put on the destruction wreaked by Hurricane Irma in the past week, following Harvey’s destruction last month, there's one economic message you should expect to read (if you haven't already.) It will likely come from an analyst at Goldman Sachs,…
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Staving Off the Coming Global Collapse
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‘Overshoot’ is when a species uses resources faster than can be replenished. We’re already there. And show no signs of changing. Humans have a virtually unlimited capacity for self-delusion, even when self-preservation is at stake. The scariest example is the simplistic, growth-oriented, market-based economic thinking that is all but running the world today. Prevailing neoliberal…
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100 Percent Wishful Thinking: The Green-Energy Cornucopia
Hurricane Irma passes by the eastern end of Cuba (NOAA) At the People’s Climate March back last spring, all along that vast river of people, the atmosphere was electric. But many of the signs and banners were far too focused on electricity. Yes, here and there were solid “System Change, Not Climate Change” –…
