A new report forecasts that shocks to food production (reductions of 5%-7%) will be three times more likely by 2040, because of increases in extreme weather brought about by climate change. As a result, the position of people in developing countries will be “almost untenable” position, with the USA and UK “very much exposed” to …
Continue reading “Food production shocks ‘will happen more often because of extreme weather’”
Journalist Paul Mason, economics editor for Channel 4 News, argues that the neoliberal capitalist model “is broken” — has had its day, is systemically unsustainable — and can be replaced with a new model. His solution? Use technology to reduce the hours of work we all do, and “consign the coercive bullshit that takes place at the precarious end of …
Continue reading “Paul Mason argues that capitalism is failing”
Some people think we can keep extracting fossil fuels and later use some techno-fix to extract the carbon back out of the atmosphere. Researchers in Germany have found that even if we did that, the fact that the oceans absorb CO2, then transport it to the deep ocean, means that the oceans would stay …
For the record, it appears that ocean currents are destabilizing methane hydrates on the Arctic slope. The warmer the ocean gets, the more methane gets spewed out of those stores on the continental shelf, and the warmer the ocean gets, ad infinitum. There is an immense amount of carbon stored in the arctic. “It’s a giant number. But we …
Continue reading “Climatologist: If We Release a Small Fraction of Arctic Carbon, ‘We’re F*cked’”
For the record, new analysis shows that the number of wild animals on Earth has halved in the past 40 years. Creatures across land, rivers and the seas are being decimated as humans kill them for food in unsustainablenumbers, while polluting or destroying their habitats. “If half the animals died in London zoo next week …
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The five ’emerging’ BRICS economies of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa account for a quarter of the world economy (24.5%). Their voting power at the IMF is only 10.3 percent. They have decided to stop waiting for the US Congress to ratify reforms to that voting structure. At their sixth summit recently they announced …
“We’re going to run out of water long before we run out of oil,” says Peter Brabeck, chairman of Nestlé. In the first instalment of a series on the threat of water scarcity, the Financial Times describes the impact on companies. “We have a water crisis because we make wrong water-management decisions. Climate change will further affect …
The President of Iceland says we are at an historic crossroads, where “we have to choose (whether we like it or not) what is more important: the interests of the financial markets, or the democratic will of the people.” (from 34-55 seconds)
Back in March the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change published its latest Working Group II report. The report predicted: food insecurity due to more intense droughts, floods, and heat waves a decline in crop yields starting in 2030, even as global food demand continues to rise water insecurity, due to shrinking of glaciers and changing …
Continue reading “UN’s IPCC: “climate change consequences ‘bleak’, but cheap to fix””
Here is Noam Chomsky speaking eloquently and briefly on current energy policy and its implications for the legacy of our generation for future generations: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Axdrh9F3Kqo