What would our vulnerable descendants choose: phasing out fossil fuels or a regulated managed decline of fossil fuels globally? Phasing out fossil fuels is rightfully the all important climate change topic this Fall. After decades of failure to even peak greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and with escalating damage from climate events, it is imperative that emissions be reduced rapidly. But[Read More…]
The persistent La Niña of the past three years is rapidly cycling into the El Niño phase. There are indications that it could become a major El Niño which could push GMT warming to record levels – perhaps even exceeding a 1.5C rise while escalating climate impacts and damage. While this surge of impacts and damage will hopefully not be[Read More…]
Dr. Tim Lenton is one of my fav climate scientists. His work on the physics and maths of tipping points and the implications of tipping points within the earth systems science understanding of how our climate could change is both fascinating and cliff edge scary. Now a new report delivered at Davos by Dr. Lenton’s Exeter university team and the[Read More…]
Karl Burkart is deputy director of the ENGO One Earth and a prolific writer on environmental issues. Recently he has published two opeds defending the energy transition (here and here). These opeds are well intentioned but still disinformation at a crucial time for climate mitigation. I have written a critique of Mr. Burkart’s perspective, tried to find an address for him but[Read More…]
From my vantage point out here in the boonies, it’s easy to see that most of my fellow Canadians and citizens of at least the developed world are in society-wide implicatory denial on climate. (The climate science facts are not denied or re-interpreted, but instead “the psychological, political or moral implications that conventionally follow” from these facts are denied or[Read More…]
“(T)he technological and institutional status quo is a precarious predicament from which societies need to escape….If we act wisely, the coming century will be defined by the recognition of what we owe the future, and our grandchildren will look back at us with gratitude and pride. If we mess up, they might never see the light of day.” William MacAskill[Read More…]
Just before the release of the IPCC Working Group Three (WGIII) report on mitigation, this long time climate activist asked: Will the new IPCC report on mitigation detail and recommend supply-side pathways and policies to mitigate climate change? Will the report even mention regulating a phase out of fossil fuel production? Or will supply-side pathways and policies and their supporters[Read More…]
Will the new IPCC report on mitigation detail and recommend supply-side pathways and policies to mitigate climate change? Will the report even mention regulating a phase out of fossil fuel production? Despite the increasing severity of climate impacts and the daunting timeline for mitigation needed to have even a fifty-fifty chance of staying climate safe? Or will supply-side pathways and[Read More…]
Image by Thomas Homer-Dixon The second part of the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) has just been released and “climate breakdown is accelerating rapidly, many of the impacts will be more severe than predicted and there is only a narrow chance left of avoiding its worst ravages”. The Working Group 11 report focuses upon local as well as global impacts[Read More…]
We’re on a trajectory to crash the futures of most people on the planet and finalize the irreversible annihilation of a big chunk of the natural world because of a mix of predatory delay and terminal entitlement. Climate futurist Alex Steffen Climate wise it’s clear that as we limp from ‘21 to ‘22 those who want to protect the economy[Read More…]
In a very insightful essay published a couple of weeks before Canada’s election call, Senator Rosa Galvez called for a seachange from neoliberal government to building government back better to handle the recovery from Covid and to mitigate climate change: “We need democracy back—stronger, wiser, and more open to new ideas—with all its checks and balances restored. Governments must[Read More…]
“(W)e haven’t even started to talk about what might be ‘possible’ and are still mostly arguing about what is ‘feasible without compromising economic growth.’ These are of course extremely different things, and the latter will not get us anywhere near the 1.5 degrees C target.” Damon Matthews Although last weeks court cases and shareholder battles have been (rightly) called a[Read More…]
Covering Climate Now, CCNow, is a consortium of publications and journalists dedicated to better climate journalism; I’m a climate activist not a climate journalist but I subscribe to the CCNow newsletter as a good source of climate news as well as an insight to the world of climate journalism. In the April 21st edition I found a link to ‘what[Read More…]
“(T)he most obvious, ubiquitous, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about.” David Foster Wallace Bill Gates has both a new book and education campaign on mitigating climate change. Mr. Gates personifies successful, transforming innovation. His book is just coming out now but he has been following the evolution of our climate problem[Read More…]
Ed Yong is a very insightful science journalist. In an article published in The Atlantic in September Yong lists what he calls nine errors of intuition, conceptual errors that still hamstring the US pandemic response. Remarkably many of Yong’s errors of intuition offer valuable insight into the global failure to enact effective climate mitigation. The successful and not very successful[Read More…]
Climate activists all over the world have been working to try and use the huge Covid opportunity to help to finally transition off fossil fuels. Most have been piggybacking on the Green New Deal framework proposed by the Democrats in the US. How could a plan to invest in a Green New Deal for Australia be serious mis-education of Australians[Read More…]
“This probably doesn’t need to be said but planning for low probability, high impact, worst case scenarios is looking pretty smart right now.” Gavin Schmidt The building climate change dangers promise to make the coronavirus pandemic look like a day off work with a cold. Increasing global temperature means rising sea levels, worsening extreme weather, more forest fires, and widening[Read More…]
An open letter to Canada’s Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland Minister Freeland, an open letter regarding ‘there’s nothing inconsistent about the federal government’s commitment to reducing greenhouse gas emissions while promoting a thriving oil and gas sector on the Prairies’. Climate change is a suite of potential dangers. Canadian governments have agreed in international treaties going back three decades to try[Read More…]
Neoliberalism has put the blinders on public imagination, hindering our ability to envision, and thus build, a world free from fossil fuels. Fremstad and Paul It’s the beginning of a new year and decade. 2020 beckons. Life is good, better than the human condition has ever been, but climate change is happening, is accelerating and has become an existential danger[Read More…]
Climate change is real, happening. It is human caused – mostly through our use of fossil fuels, and could be catastrophic, could be a tragic end to our present evolution. Without effective mitigation. But we’ve gone three decades of failure to even slow the increase in burning coal, oil and natural gas, with consequential greenhouse gases (GHGs) increasing in the[Read More…]
Energy transitions have historically taken many decades, half centuries. But now, to stay under even a 2C (and not the much safer 1.5C) global rise in temperature, greenhouse gas emissions must be halved in each of the upcoming decades. Climate change is now a sprint with heavy emission reduction needed as quickly as possible. A carbon pricing aided decarbonization where[Read More…]
There is a Canadian federal election on the horizon. The campaigning has already begun. I’m a long time climate activist who thinks that you should know a very important perspective on climate change and, in particular, mitigation strategies in Canada (election issue). But what I have to tell you is out of the box, outside the Overton Window, heretical;[Read More…]
Below is a selection of quotes from a long essay explaining how neoliberalism, solution aversion, implicatory denial and predatory delay have frustrated needed effective climate mitigation. Hey you XR kids, these quotes (and the docs they are from) explain why we have failed to implement effective treatment for at least three decades; this is why you are instead on a[Read More…]
We’re dead men walking. Last summer a group of eminent climate scientists published a warning that we were close to a threshold where human induced warming could set off a cascade of positive feedbacks which would increase temperatures to Hothouse Earth, a 5-7C rise in temperature, the end of civilization and maybe even humanity. They warned that “Incremental linear changes[Read More…]
“A fast,emergency-scale transition to a post-fossil fuel world is absolutely necessary to address climate change. But this is excluded from consideration by policymakers because it is considered to be too disruptive. The orthodoxy is that there is time for an orderly economic transition within the current short-termist political paradigm.Discussion of what would be safe—less warming that we presently experience—is non-existent.[Read More…]
Hothouse Earth is this summer’s Uninhabitable Earth, a chilling reminder of how close we are to possibly fatal climate change. The Steffen et al PNAS paper is a review of the climate science concerned with the interplay of ten potential tipping points which when triggered by temperature rise due to anthropogenic warming could potentially push the Earth out of it’s[Read More…]
This spring I was diagnosed with cancer and I have just finished a treatment consisting of seven weeks of radiation aided by chemo therapy. Things look good now. I had a very treatable cancer; I have had effective treatment as quickly as possible. As a long time climate activist totally preoccupied with trying to get to effective climate mitigation my[Read More…]
Hello Justin, I hope you understand that while I must be critical of you and your government I have a great deal of empathy for everyone involved in this wicked problem climate change. I recognize that there are severe constraints upon you and every other national leader. But we still need effective mitigation urgently or climate change promises to become[Read More…]
This third essay on my new metaphor for effectively treating climate change is about climate change being potentially fatal for all we know and love, potentially fatal for civilization as we know it, maybe even for humanity itself. Do we need to consider a major disruption in our society and economy for effective treatment of what could be a fatal disease?[Read More…]
Continuing my new metaphor for effectively treating climate change (I’ve been traveling into town everyday: ferry, bus, Canada Line to the Cancer Agency and same back from treatment) – this quote was in my post-Canada Day Guardian Weekly: “I can’t believe how long I’ve been on hold,” says the Canadian who’s been on hold for the length of time it takes a kettle to[Read More…]
Hello again Ms. Goldsmith-Jones, At a climate meeting you arranged at Gibsons Yacht Club before the election I said I thought you were in what Kari Norgaard describes as implicatory denial: climate change itself is not denied but “the psychological, political and moral imperatives that conventionally follow”. And then again after you were elected MP I talked with you after[Read More…]
Human caused global warming increasingly threatens all we love and care about. Climate change from this warming caused (mostly) by greenhouse gases (GHGs) from our use of fossil fuels is a potent growing risk to our families, our kids and their kids, our communities and country. This radical change threatens most of the species and ecosystems with which we share[Read More…]
Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau should resign. That’s laughable presently. The Trudeau government is still enjoying an extra long honeymoon; Canadians are still as happy about the change to ‘sunny ways’ as Americans are distraught with the specter of at least four years of slime, sleeze and shame. But our PM is a dead man walking. Trudeau and his government[Read More…]
John Michael Greer has written a provocative essay: Climate Change Activism: a Postmortem. His list of activist mistakes should be interesting to many of you but Greer makes the same tactical error as the activists he derides in his ‘postmortem’. Greer is still concerned about winning political and economic battles instead of getting to necessary emergency government as quickly as[Read More…]
Stumbling Towards Old Age And Looking for Someone to Lean On 
Tolstoy’s Dilemma 
Ukraine Peace Activists Protest During Zelensky White House Visit 
“Our world is becoming unhinged”: Antonio Guterres 
How Chances of Direct War between the USA and Russia Are Increasing 
G20 Biofuel Alliance threatens Food security 
Thousands Of Auto Workers Strike In Three U.S. Plants, Face Financial Hardship 
Submission To Australian National Anti-Corruption Commission, NACC: Mainstream Media Lying 
In The Name of Decolonization 
Is This the End of French Neo-Colonialism in Africa? 
Tel Aviv’s Losing Brands: Israeli ‘Coup’ and the Death of False Democracy 
Tackling Global Emergencies – UN International Day of Peace 
The Futility of Feudalistic Democracy 
Bayer over-riding Bhartiya Krishi 
Pulwama Bombing 14th February 2019: Unanswered Questions 
Himalayan Apple Growers Worried Over Increasing Threat from Imports 
After protests in flood-hit Derna, Libyan officials order journalists to leave 
International Day of Peace: Fostering Harmony and Unity in a World of Diversity 
More Butterflies, Fewer Billionaires — Unrigging the Global Economy 
Veganic Farming: How My Tiny Plot Produced 5,000 Pounds of Food Without Using Manure 
Fighting the Diaspora: India’s Campaign Against Khalistan 
CAIR Files Lawsuit to End Islamophobic No Fly List 
N.D.Mahanor, The Poet Who Taught Us to See Culture in Agriculture 
Dark and light streaks in India-China relations 
Why the Central Government Should Rush Special Aid Package for Himachal Pradesh 
Special Session: Another Image-Boosting Move? 
Eddelu ( Wake up) Karnataka: The Great Citizen’s Wall Against BJP 
Urgency of Improving Dam Safety Re-Emphasized in Libya and Ukraine 
Climate Crisis Threatens Largest U.S. Cities 
Little Amal Entertains and Informs on Refugee Children’s Strife 
Google Trial Must Fuel the Global Movement Against Digital Capitalism 
Linking Aadhaar With NPR Records: Is it Based on Informed Consent? 
In the debates before 2024 Elections in India, Agenda for Justice, Peace, Democracy and Environment Most Needed 
US imperialist hypocrisy and the Libyan flood 
Some Remarks on Russia in Global Politics Today 
A climate of Insanity 
Brief for Murder: Pinochet’s Apologists Five Decades On ‘Epidemic’ or Revolution: The Other Side of the West Africa Upheaval 
White Nationalism and Donald Trump 
How Arab Leaders Betrayed Islam and Defied the Logic of Political Change, Peace and Security? 
My Amma (Malayalam word for Mother) passed away on August 22, 2023 at 3.10 AM. It is always difficult to deal with the passing of a parent, that too one’s mother. I thought the grief would go away. No it didn’t. All those bitter sweet memories won’t go away. At night I lie awake for hours. My friend, guide and[Read More…]
