Environment

Greenfield, MA (Special to Informed Comment) -Budgets are moral documents (or immoral, depending on priorities). So also is tax policy. Consider Trump’s proposed $1.3 trillion discretionary budget for 2021. In snapshot, the Pentagon gets 55% and every other need of 331 million people–from health, education, agriculture, transportation, environmental protection to housing–is left with 45%. As […]

Climate Crisis

Wind Power surges by 20 Percent! Why Gov’t Should Put Stimulus Money into it to Help Economy and the Earth

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Wind power is growing by leaps and bounds, with new installations up 20 percent in 2019. A whole 60 gigawatts was installed globally last year, mainly by China and the US. So writes Jim Timmer at Ars Technica. The good news is that 20 percent growth year on year is […]

Climate Crisis

US Nat’l Security State Tilted at War on Terror Windmills when Real Threats — Climate and Pandemic — were at Home

Andrew J. Bacevich

( Tomdispatch.com) – Americans are facing “A Spring Unlike Any Before.” So warned a front-page headline in the March 13th New York Times. That headline, however hyperbolic, was all too apt. The coming of spring has always promised relief from the discomforts of winter. Yet, far too often, it also brings its own calamities and […]

Climate Crisis

A Planet of Missing Beauties: In Memoriam

Tom Engelhardt

( Tomdispatch.com) – The other morning, walking at the edge of a local park, I caught sight of a beautiful red cardinal, the first bird I ever saw some 63 years ago. Actually, to make that sentence accurate, I should probably have put either “first” or “ever saw” in quotation marks. After all, I was […]

Climate Crisis

Why Countries should use Coronavirus Economic Stimulus to Transition to Green New Deal

Clean Energy Wire

By Rachel Waldholz | – ( Clean Energy Wire) – Foundations are calling on the EU to use any economic stimulus enacted in response to the coronavirus to accelerate the transition to a green economy. The global climate crisis cannot be ignored even as governments focus on the health crisis, said Laurence Tubiana of the […]

Climate Crisis

Why Burning Fossil Fuels is to Today’s Pandemics as Fleas were to the Black Death

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Sheri Fink at the NYT reports that Center for Disease Control scientific modeler Matthew Biggerstaff estimated in a conference call that the coronavirus pandemic could last for many months or as long as a year and could infect half to two-thirds of the population of the United States. Between 200,000 […]

Climate Crisis

Climate Change is already Diminishing the Colorado River, U.S. Researchers Find

Cronkite News Arizona PBS

By Luke Runyon /KUNC | ( Cronkite News) – GREELEY, Colo. – A warming climate already is reducing stream flows in the Southwest’s largest watershed, according to a new study from scientists with the U.S. Geological Survey. And as the planet continues to heat up, it said, the shortages are likely to get worse. Using […]

Featured

Behind the Turmoil: Russia Provoked Oil Price Fall to Protect its Markets from US Frackers, which could now Collapse

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Last weekend, OPEC Plus, an expanded cartel of petroleum exporters, considered a plan for members to cut back on their oil production so as to support prices in the face of a slowing world economy owing to the novel coronavirus. The Russian Federation rejected the plan put forward by OPEC, […]

Climate Crisis

Civil Disobedience in the Time of Climate Crisis

H. Patricia Hynes

On March 27, 2018, a Massachusetts judge found thirteen protestors who obstructed construction of a high-pressure fracked gas pipeline in West Roxbury, Massachusetts not responsible for their crime of trespassing and disturbing the peace. The judge ruled that the potential environmental and public health impacts of the pipeline – including the risk of climate change […]