Environment

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Solar panels are great sources of energy. We have them on our roof and they have saved us a lot of money, especially in spring-summer-fall. Some observers complain about their bulk compared to the energy they put out, though. I’ve had engineers argue to me that there just isn’t space […]

Climate Crisis

“Orbital,” by Samantha Harvey – A Short but Powerful Story urging us to Save the Planet – Wins 2024 Book Prize

The Conversation

By Debra Benita Shaw, University of East London | – (The Conversation) – Samantha Harvey’s Orbital has won the 2024 Booker prize. What it so skilfully and ambitiously exposes is the human cost of space flight set against the urgency of the climate crisis. While a typhoon of life-threatening proportions gathers across south-east Asia, six […]

Climate Crisis

Creating a Genuine Hell on Earth

Tom Engelhardt

( Tomdispatch.com ) – Honestly, what would George Orwell have written about this planet of ours, four decades after that ominous year 1984 passed from his fiction into history? And yes, in case you think that, as in his novel 1984, published in 1949, a year before his death and just as the Cold War […]

Climate Crisis

As COP 29 convenes, Human-Caused Climate Change Menaces the Middle East Across Borders

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – The European Centre for Development Policy Management has issued a new report on the threats of human-caused climate change to the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, concentrating on cross-border dangers that affect more than one country. Heat and drought would rank high on this list. The Middle East […]

Climate Crisis

Warped Government Priorities make Climate Disasters Worse

Basav Sen

When we fund wars and fossil fuel subsidies instead of green jobs and disaster recovery, we punish those who can least afford it. ( Otherwords.org ) – This year’s hurricane season has been devastating. Hurricane Helene left a trail of wreckage across the Southeast and Appalachia, where over 230 people have died so far. Barely […]

Climate Crisis

Extreme Weather has already cost Vulnerable Island Nations $141 Billion

The Conversation

Emily Wilkinson, ODI Global; Ilan Noy, Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington; Matt Bishop, University of Sheffield, and Vikrant Panwar, ODI Global (The Conversation) – Two years ago, when the curtain fell on the COP27 summit in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt, developing nations on the frontline of climate change had something meaningful to […]

Climate Crisis

Newly Elected Trump is Threatening to turn back the Tide on America’s environmental Laws and reverse Climate Progress

The Conversation

By Stephen Lezak, University of Oxford and Barbara Haya, University of California, Berkeley | – The Cuyahoga River, which runs through downtown Cleveland, Ohio, used to catch fire every decade or so. It started in the 1860s, when the river became choked with industrial waste, and the conflagrations continued all the way until the 1960s […]

Climate Crisis

Valencia Floods: Our warming Climate is making once-rare Weather more Common, and more Destructive

The Conversation

By Antonio Ruiz de Elvira Serra, Universidad de Alcalá | – (The Conversation) – In the last few days, a seasonal weather system known in Spain as the “cold drop” or DANA (an acronym of depresión aislada en niveles altos: isolated depression at high levels) has caused heavy rain and flooding across Spain’s Mediterranean coast […]

Climate Crisis

Trump would be an “Extinction-Level Event” for the Planet, Turbocharging Climate Change. Vote Accordingly.

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – UC Berkeley scholars warn that “with plans to expand the production of fossil fuels, curtail environmental regulations, dismantle key climate monitoring agencies and even undermine the Endangered Species Act, there is no question that Project 2025 would be disastrous for the climate.” Project 2025, despite his dishonest denials, is Trump’s […]