Articles by: Stan Cox

Young Montanans Fight Climate Change for All of Us

Young Montanans Fight Climate Change for All of Us

The wording in Article IX, Section 1, of Montana’s constitution couldn’t be clearer: “The state and each person shall maintain and improve a clean and healthful environment in Montana for present and future generations.” Accordingly, in April, a district court judge in Yellowstone County voided a permit for a natural-gas-fired power plant under construction there. Over its lifetime, it would have released an estimated[Read More…]

by 15/09/2023 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
You Could Fry an Egg on the Sunbelt - by Priti Gulati Cox

The Hubris of Plutocrats: They Can’t Escape the Heat That’s Coming

The future is here. A study recently published by a team of British and Dutch scientists found that this summer’s horrific heat waves “would have been virtually impossible to occur in the US/Mexico region and Southern Europe if humans had not warmed the planet by burning fossil fuels.” More and more, it seems that heat waves, more than storms, flooding,[Read More…]

by 15/08/2023 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
By Priti Gulati Cox

Catching Heat from Big Brother: Education and Climate in MAGAland

In recent years, almost half of US state legislatures have passed laws that directly undermine local communities’ efforts to curb climate change. More prominent in the headlines, though, have been bills targeting public education and violating a host of constitutional rights, many of them now signed into law. These “culture war” laws don’t directly address climate. But unless they are[Read More…]

by 15/07/2023 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
We’re Having a Violent Meltdown: The Human Costs of Global Warming — and of Our Response to It

We’re Having a Violent Meltdown: The Human Costs of Global Warming — and of Our Response to It

Several times in recent weeks I’ve heard people suggest that Mother Nature has been speaking to us through that smoke endlessly drifting south from the still-raging Canadian wildfires. She’s saying that she wants the coal, oil, and gas left in the ground, but I fear her message will have little more influence on climate policy than her previous ones did. After all,[Read More…]

by 28/06/2023 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Image/Priti Gulati Cox

Needed: Either Degrowth or Two Earths

In a May 30 essay for the New York Times titled “The New Climate Law Is Working. Clean Energy Investments Are Soaring,” one of the architects of last year’s Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), Brian Deese, wrote, “Nine months since that law was passed in Congress, the private sector has mobilized well beyond our initial expectations to generate clean energy, build[Read More…]

by 16/06/2023 Comments are Disabled Counter Solutions
The Old Future Is Gone, and Technology Won’t Bring It Back

The Old Future Is Gone, and Technology Won’t Bring It Back

  As we begin the second year of “In Real Time,” the future doesn’t look very promising. Almost one-third of US states have plunged into one-party authoritarian rule, and many are gripped by hostility to any form of climate action. Over the past year, voters and activists across the nation have managed to slow the anti-democratic slide, but nothing has[Read More…]

by 19/05/2023 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
How Ecofascists Are Fueling Racism and Deadly Violence

How Ecofascists Are Fueling Racism and Deadly Violence

It’s not often that conservative lobbyists beat the drum for increased environmental oversight and regulation. But that’s what happened this month when the far-right Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), through its legal arm, filed a brief in federal court demanding that the Department of Homeland Security conduct an extensive environmental impact study examining, of all things, immigration policy. In a press[Read More…]

by 26/04/2023 Comments are Disabled World
Atlanta’s “Cop City” and the Struggle for Climate Justice

Atlanta’s “Cop City” and the Struggle for Climate Justice

Along the South River, in the southwest corner of DeKalb County, Georgia, lies a forested area of about 300 acres that has been owned by the nearby City of Atlanta for over a century. It was once part of a vastly larger wooded landscape, home to the Muskogee (Creek) people. They gave the river and forest the name “Weelaunee.” In[Read More…]

by 21/04/2023 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Doctors participate in an Extinction Rebellion demonstration in London's Trafalgar Square on October 12, 2019. (Photo: Chris J. Ratcliffe/Getty Images)

Tinpot Legislators – Their One-Party Rule Will Be Ruinous for the Earth

The demise of Silicon Valley Bank last month triggered plenty of angst among solar energy developers. Before it collapsed, SBV claimed it had “financed or helped finance 62 percent of community solar projects in America,” according to Washington Post business reporter Evan Halper. At first, it wasn’t clear who might fill that gap. MAGA politicians took great delight in the disruption of what they tediously[Read More…]

by 03/04/2023 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
The quantity of energy contained in the fossil fuels used to produce feed grains for cattle is ten times the amount of energy contained in the marketable beef that’s produced by those cattle.

Climate Policy’s on Shaky Ground in the Farm Bill

Members of Congress have begun drafting the 2023 “Farm Bill,” and they’ll be wrangling over it through most of the year. This legislation, passed into law anew every fifth year or so since the 1930s, has had far-reaching influence on food and farming in the United States. Each version of the bill is given its own name; the previous one,[Read More…]

by 16/03/2023 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
“Sometimes a Gas Stove Is Not Just a Gas Stove”

“Sometimes a Gas Stove Is Not Just a Gas Stove”

A Fox News headline writer called it “Biden’s War on Your Kitchen.” Wall Street Journal columnist Kimberley Strassel wrote, “The reason gas stoves are in the news is simple: There is a coordinated, calculated—and well-funded—strategy to kill them off. It’s the joint enterprise of extremely powerful climate groups, working with Biden administration officials.” (“Extremely powerful climate groups”? Where can I[Read More…]

by 16/02/2023 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
“To Create Civil Disorder and Inspire Further Violence”: The Far-Right Assault on Our Future  

“To Create Civil Disorder and Inspire Further Violence”: The Far-Right Assault on Our Future  

Lost in the rush of political and climate-related news in the closing weeks of 2022 was the small but intriguing story of a December 3 armed attack on two power substations in Moore County, North Carolina. The installations were severely damaged by gunfire, leaving 45,000 residents to suffer through the winter cold without power, many of them for several days.[Read More…]

by 12/01/2023 Comments are Disabled World
Paying for an Overheating Earth

Paying for an Overheating Earth

by Stan Cox & Priti Gulati Cox  On October 29th, 75-year-old Saifullah Paracha, Guantánamo Bay’s oldest detainee, was finally released by U.S. authorities and flown home to his family in Karachi, Pakistan. He had been incarcerated for nearly two decades without either charges or a trial. His plane touched down in a land still reeling from this year’s cataclysmic monsoon floods that,[Read More…]

by 01/12/2022 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
No Red Wave, but Plenty of Red Flags

No Red Wave, but Plenty of Red Flags

This November, voters stood up and rejected a host of anti-democratic candidates all across America. Although the GOP eked out a victory in the House of Representatives, dimming prospects for further progress on climate and other issues for at least a couple of years, the nation managed to avoid a much worse fate. In Part 1 of “In Real Time”[Read More…]

by 18/11/2022 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Real Climate Action’s Not at COP-27, but It Is in a Thousand Rebellious Communities

Real Climate Action’s Not at COP-27, but It Is in a Thousand Rebellious Communities

The Teck Mining Co. open-pit Elk River Valley coal mines, located in southern British Columbia along the Alberta border. Drawn from a photograph by Garth Lenz. Teck Resources were fined $60 million for polluting the rivers in March 2021. Two high-profile events will coincide next month. One of them—the US midterm elections, which will conclude November 8—could provide the strongest indicator yet of[Read More…]

by 12/10/2022 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
The Nightmare of Military Spending on an Overheating Planet

The Nightmare of Military Spending on an Overheating Planet

A Big Carbon Bootprint and a Giant Sucking Sound in the National Budget On October 1st, the U.S. military will start spending the more than $800 billion Congress is going to provide it with in fiscal year 2023. And that whopping sum will just be the beginning. According to the calculations of Pentagon expert William Hartung, funding for various intelligence agencies, the[Read More…]

by 23/09/2022 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
“We’ll Meet Them Out in the Fields”: Challenging the Pipelines to Nowhere

“We’ll Meet Them Out in the Fields”: Challenging the Pipelines to Nowhere

Recent polls suggest that the bonkers, even barbaric, rhetoric coming from far-right MAGA candidates could be undermining Republicans’ chances of capturing both chambers of Congress in November. Now, the greater danger may lie down-ballot. If extremists win key offices in swing-state governments in 2022, they might manage to award their states’ Electoral College votes to the MAGA presidential candidate, against[Read More…]

by 13/09/2022 Comments are Disabled World
This Is No Time for Climate Complacency

This Is No Time for Climate Complacency

The Inflation Reduction Act is being hailed by the mainstream climate movement, Congress members, and the media as the most important climate bill in U.S. history. That’s a pretty low bar, and it says more about our government’s long record of failure on climate than it does about whether this law can prevent dangerous temperature increases in coming decades. The[Read More…]

by 15/08/2022 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Three Tons of Fascism with a Bull Bar – Fuming at the Rest of Us, Democracy, and the Earth

Three Tons of Fascism with a Bull Bar – Fuming at the Rest of Us, Democracy, and the Earth

In the United States during 16 months in 2020 and 2021, vehicles rammed into groups of protesters at least 139 times, according to a Boston Globe analysis. Three victims died and at least 100 were injured. Consider that a new level of all-American barbarity, thanks to the growing toxicity of right-wing politics, empowered by its embrace of ever-larger, more menacing vehicles being cranked[Read More…]

by 03/08/2022 Comments are Disabled World
Confronting “Policy Murder” and the Rising Violence of the Right

Confronting “Policy Murder” and the Rising Violence of the Right

Priti Gulati Cox, It’s Time, ink on vellum, embroidery. See closeups of individual images here. On Juneteenth weekend, tens of thousands of people walked up Pennsylvania Avenue toward the U.S. Capitol as part of the epically titled Poor People’s and Low-Wage Workers’ Assembly and Moral March on Washington and to the Polls. (Priti Gulati Cox and I traveled via Amtrak[Read More…]

by 15/07/2022 Comments are Disabled World
The People vs. Petrocracy

The People vs. Petrocracy

The United States is moving fast on climate change—in the wrong direction. The Energy Information Agency forecasts that by 2023, the nation will set a new annual record for oil extraction: 4.6 billion barrels. Plans to build more than 200 new natural gas power plants are in the works. More than 130 new oil and gas pipelines now under development[Read More…]

by 16/06/2022 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Onslaught of the Oily Authoritarians

Onslaught of the Oily Authoritarians

  “I think for me the struggle to defend the truth is a precondition for defending our democracy, and the struggle to defend our democracy is a precondition for taking the effective action that needs to be taken in order to meet the climate crisis in a serious way and turn it around.” — U.S. House member Jamie Raskin of[Read More…]

by 28/05/2022 Comments are Disabled World
It’s Time. Pen & Ink on vellum embroidered on canvas/  by Priti Gulati Cox

The Climate and the Republic, Melting Down in Real Time

The United States is facing two grim prospects in 2022: one, that continued abuse of the ecosphere could render much of the Earth unlivable for humans and myriad other species, and two, that the United States’ current political drift toward autocratic rule could accelerate, dashing any hope of attaining a multiracial, pluralistic democracy. These two emergencies are intertwined. Either we[Read More…]

by 23/04/2022 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
A Bipartisan Oil Rush or the Phasing Out of Fossil Fuels?

A Bipartisan Oil Rush or the Phasing Out of Fossil Fuels?

While the Ukrainian people bear the lethal brunt of Russia’s invasion, shockwaves from that war threaten to worsen other crises across the planet. The emergency that loomed largest before Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine began — the heating of the Earth’s climate — is now looming larger still. The reason is simple enough: a war-induced rush to boost oil and[Read More…]

by 31/03/2022 Comments are Disabled World
Noam Chomsky Says We Have No Right to Gamble with the Lives of Climate-Vulnerable People: Video

Noam Chomsky Says We Have No Right to Gamble with the Lives of Climate-Vulnerable People: Video

On October 1, 2021, a month before the kickoff of the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow, I had the good fortune to spend an hour with Noam Chomsky for a video interview. (A week before the summit, TomDispatch published an abridged transcript of the interview.) At the time we spoke, it was already clear that the powerful governments and corporations[Read More…]

by 30/11/2021 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
To Keep Fossil Carbon Out of the Air, Just Stop Pulling It Out of the Earth

To Keep Fossil Carbon Out of the Air, Just Stop Pulling It Out of the Earth

Expectations for the 2021 COP26 climate summit were always low. They had dimmed even further by the time the prominent climate activist Vanessa Nakate of Uganda spoke from the main stage on the Glasgow conference’s next-to-last day. Nakate chided her audience for sleepwalking toward catastrophe: “We see business leaders and investors flying into COP on private jets. We see them[Read More…]

by 20/11/2021 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
From Popovers to Popunders: The Kind of Decarbonization That Can Succeed

From Popovers to Popunders: The Kind of Decarbonization That Can Succeed

by Stan Cox and Priti Gulati Cox From the field and kitchen of discomfort food So much carbon dioxide has now accumulated in the atmosphere that it’s no longer possible to prevent a dangerous rise in global temperatures through purely technological means. In other words, it’s too late to prevent catastrophic ecological damage and human suffering simply through building more[Read More…]

by 21/09/2021 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Enough for Everyone

Enough for Everyone

Given the current climate emergency and the broader ecological breakdown that looms, there are few issues more pressing than that expressed by the single word: enough. Yet, it is possible to satisfy humanity’s universal needs fairly—and keep the world livable. What is enough? Put that question to any economist or politician, and you are likely to get a blank stare in return.[Read More…]

by 02/09/2021 Comments are Disabled Counter Solutions
It Is Possible to Satisfy Humanity’s Universal Needs Fairly and Keep the World Livable?

It Is Possible to Satisfy Humanity’s Universal Needs Fairly and Keep the World Livable?

Given the current climate emergency and the broader ecological breakdown that looms, there are few issues more pressing than that expressed by the single word: enough. What is enough? Put that question to any economist or politician, and you are likely to get a blank stare in return. In a society devoted to continuous economic growth, there is no way to[Read More…]

by 17/08/2021 Comments are Disabled Counter Solutions
Earth Abuse and the Next Pandemic

Earth Abuse and the Next Pandemic

Humanity’s transgression of ecological limits has caused widespread damage, including a climate emergency, catastrophic loss of biodiversity, and extensive degradation of soils around the world. Earth abuse is also at the root of the Covid-19 pandemic and the grim likelihood that new pathogens will continue to emerge from other animal species to infect humans. [image: “Human Miasma” by Priti Gulati[Read More…]

by 19/04/2021 Comments are Disabled World
Review of ‘Cuban Health Care: The Ongoing Revolution’ by Don Fitz

Review of ‘Cuban Health Care: The Ongoing Revolution’ by Don Fitz

Don Fitz’s new book Cuban Health Care: The Ongoing Revolution was going to press at Monthly Review in early spring, as the pandemic was ramping up, so he had just barely enough time to slip in a postscript teasingly titled, “How Che Guevara Taught Cuba to Confront COVID-19.” The postscript puts an exclamation mark on the medical history of Cuba[Read More…]

by 18/09/2020 Comments are Disabled Book Review
The Coronavirus-Climate-Air Conditioning Nexus

The Coronavirus-Climate-Air Conditioning Nexus

A wave of persistent, intense heat and humidity has enveloped the Midwest, South, and Northeast in this second half of July. By the time it subsides, more than half of the U.S. population will have been hit with heat indexes above 100; for many, the heat wave will last for several days. The severe heat is driving almost all social[Read More…]

by 21/07/2020 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
It’s Not Just Meat: All Farm and Food Workers Are in Peril

It’s Not Just Meat: All Farm and Food Workers Are in Peril

COVID-19 outbreaks are now reaching far beyond the meatpacking industry. Migrant farmworkers in fruit orchards and vegetable fields, long the targets of intense exploitation, are seeing their health put in even greater jeopardy as they’re pushed to feed an increasingly voracious supply chain in pandemic-time. With the pandemic rolling on unchecked, the fragility of the entire U.S. food system and[Read More…]

by 30/06/2020 Comments are Disabled World
The Recent History of GDP Growth, CO2 Emissions, and Climate Policy Paralysis, All in One Table-Runner

The Recent History of GDP Growth, CO2 Emissions, and Climate Policy Paralysis, All in One Table-Runner

Co-Written by Stan Cox & Priti Gulati Cox Note: I began designing this table-runner just before the COVID-19 pandemic blew up in the United States. In the time I have been embroidering it, rates of death and misery have soared while wealth generation and carbon emissions (the two subjects of this work) have ended their decades-long rise and have plummeted.[Read More…]

by 30/04/2020 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Fair-shares rationing can cure today’s food shortages

Fair-shares rationing can cure today’s food shortages

Co-Written by Stan Cox and Ezra Silk For weeks, pandemic-induced overbuying has resulted in shortages of staple foods and sanitation products. With their shelves stripped, supermarkets are donating much less to food banks just as those services are being overwhelmed by a surge of newly jobless clients. Disinfectant wipes are selling for extortionate prices online — if they are available at all.[Read More…]

by 22/04/2020 Comments are Disabled World
Climbing the Deadly Curves of COVID-19 and Capitalism

Climbing the Deadly Curves of COVID-19 and Capitalism

Co-Written by Stan Cox and Priti Gulati Cox An embroidery work illustrating the early course of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United  States—more images of which are posted here at the Sidewalk Museum of Congress—follows the exponential growth in number of confirmed cases. The cumulative number rose very slowly through February, reached 100 on March 2, then leaped to 1,000[Read More…]

by 26/03/2020 Comments are Disabled World
Healing the Rift Between Political Reality and Ecological Reality: A Q & A with Shaun Chamberlin

Healing the Rift Between Political Reality and Ecological Reality: A Q & A with Shaun Chamberlin

If U.S. greenhouse emissions are to be driven down to zero within a decade or even two, it will not be accomplished through building more solar and wind energy capacity and relying on market competition to eliminate fossil fuels from the economy. A direct, foolproof mechanism is required to drive oil, gas, and coal out of the economy, by law[Read More…]

by 15/10/2019 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
That Green Growth at the Heart of the Green New Deal? It’s Malignant

That Green Growth at the Heart of the Green New Deal? It’s Malignant

A burgeoning save-the-climate effort called the Green New Deal, explains Vox’s David Roberts, “has thrust climate change into the national conversation, put House Democrats on notice, and created an intense and escalating bandwagon effect. … everyone involved in green politics is talking about the GND. … But WTF is it?” Roberts goes on to give a good summary, but no[Read More…]

by 15/01/2019 1 comment Counter Solutions
The Air-Conditioning Debate Isn’t Really About Air-Conditioning

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 heating up the outdoors of[Read More…]

by 11/09/2018 Comments are Disabled Climate Change
Yet Another Appeal for “Green” Capitalism, Annotated

Yet Another Appeal for “Green” Capitalism, Annotated

The Guardian recently published an opinion piece by its economics editor Larry Elliott, in which he argued that capitalism can rescue civilization from the global climate emergency. Here are excerpts, with me interrupting. From Elliott’s piece: Innovation is what capitalism is all about, and there has been staggeringly rapid progress in developing clean alternatives to coal, oil and gas. The[Read More…]

by 23/08/2018 2 comments Climate Change
Cornucopian Renewable-Energy Claims Leave Poor Nations in the Dark

Cornucopian Renewable-Energy Claims Leave Poor Nations in the Dark

Stanford professor Mark Jacobson and his colleagues have written yet another paper purporting to show that 100 percent of energy demand can be fulfilled by wind, solar, and hydroelectric generation. This latest study, which comes in the form of a manuscript accepted but not yet published by the journal Renewable Energy, seeks to show how that goal can be met in 139 nations.[Read More…]

by 24/02/2018 Comments are Disabled Alternative Energy
Betting The Earth On A Game of Wrap-Cut-Smash

Betting The Earth On A Game of Wrap-Cut-Smash

 The Earth is having to deal with continuous, largely unchecked emissions of greenhouse gases, along with soil degradation, mass extinction of species, destruction of ecosystems, and disruption of nitrogen, phosphorous, and water cycles. Meanwhile, efforts to head off the planet-wide ecological crisis remain trapped in a game of rock-paper-scissors. [1] Let’s start with the “paper,” which represents the kinds of[Read More…]

by 22/01/2018 1 comment Climate Change
Before Maria, Forcing Puerto Rico To Pay Its Debt Was Odious. Now It’s Pure Cruelty

Before Maria, Forcing Puerto Rico To Pay Its Debt Was Odious. Now It’s Pure Cruelty

Co-Written by Stan Cox and Paul Cox Donald Trump’s sadistic attacks on the people of Puerto Rico got most of the headlines, but it is colonial exploitation that created the unnatural disaster that continues to play out in America’s Caribbean territories. Many, including Trump, predict that the debt burden will make it extremely difficult for Puerto Rico to rebuild after[Read More…]

by 04/10/2017 1 comment World
100 Percent Wishful Thinking: The Green-Energy Cornucopia

100 Percent Wishful Thinking: The Green-Energy Cornucopia

  At the People’s Climate March back last spring, all along that vast river of people, the atmosphere was electric. But electricity was also the focus of too many of the signs and banners. Yes, here and there were solid “System Change, Not Climate Change” – themed signs and banners. But the bulk of slogans on display asserted or implied[Read More…]

by 13/09/2017 Comments are Disabled Alternative Energy
The Merkley-Sanders Climate Bill Isn’t a Launchpad. It’s Quicksand

The Merkley-Sanders Climate Bill Isn’t a Launchpad. It’s Quicksand

  With the Trump administration poised to withdraw from the Paris Climate Agreement, a climate bill cosponsored by U.S. Senators Jeff Merkley and Bernie Sanders and known as the “100 by ’50 Act” is sure to be back in the news. In April, Sanders called the bill, S.987, an important step in the fight against greenhouse warming. The leading climate[Read More…]

by 29/05/2017 3 comments Climate Change
The researchers say 82 percent of "core ecological processes" on land and sea have been affected by climate change in a way that has not been expected "for decades." (Photo: Lwp Kommunikáció/flickr/cc)

Can The Climate Survive Electoral Democracy? May Be. Can It Survive Capitalism? No.

  Donald Trump plans to dismantle America’s already weak climate policy, potentially dooming not only this country but the entire world to runaway greenhouse warming. The day after Election Day 2016, star climate scientist Michael Mann was already saying he feared that it was “game over” for the Earth’s climate. But at the same time Trump is taking a blowtorch[Read More…]

by 22/02/2017 1 comment Climate Change
Facebook Server Farm Powered by “Clean Energy” Will Increase Denmark’s Greenhouse Emissions

Facebook Server Farm Powered by “Clean Energy” Will Increase Denmark’s Greenhouse Emissions

Co-Written by Stan Cox and Paul Cox Last month, the social-media giant Facebook announced plans to build a new data center near Odense, Denmark. The expansion of server capacity was needed, the company said, to support “richer content” such as live-streaming and virtual reality. The Facebook executive who made the public announcement (live-streamed, of course), noted that the new facility[Read More…]

by 07/02/2017 1 comment Environmental Protection
Photo: Joe Brusky/Flickr https://www.flickr.com/photos/40969298@N05/14035912283/in/photostream/

The Ascendance of Trump Makes Broad-Based Climate Action Essential And Achievable

  On December5, former vice president Al Gore met with Donald and Ivanka Trump in an effort to convince the president-elect that he should not gut federal policies and agreements dealing with climate change. Three days later, actor Leonardo Di Caprio also paid the Trump duo a visit, urging them to help build a green, climate-friendly economy with lots of[Read More…]

by 14/12/2016 1 comment Climate Change
Translate »