Posts Tagged ‘climate change’
What I Saw Outside the Blue Zone in Belém
I am Thais Mantovani, co-founder of EcoUniversidade, and for the past six years I have also been working with Local Futures, helping to strengthen the localization movement in Brazil and supporting grassroots initiatives that defend territory, rebuild food systems and imagine ecological futures from the ground up. I went to COP30 in Belém not only…
Read MoreHumanity Is Not the Problem!
‘Humanity has missed the mark. Humanity has failed.’ As COP30 gets underway, this was the media’s take on the UN Secretary-General’s announcement that 1.5 degrees of global warming has now been locked in. We should be rolling our eyes at such proclamations. Once again, humanity takes the blame for the impotence of corporate-led summits. …
Read MoreEmissions Accounting: Cooking the Books
Ready for a quick climate change quiz? See if you can identify the climate hero in the scenario below: Jared and Annette arrive at a potluck, each bringing a mixed salad with the same ingredients. By a strange coincidence they’re also wearing identical Christmas sweaters. They compare notes, and it turns out that Annette’s salad…
Read MoreThe Green Growth Delusion
In the annals of industrial civilization, the Green New Deal counts as one of the more ambitious projects. Its scale is vast, promising to reform every aspect of how we power our machines, light our homes and fuel our cars. At this late hour of ecological and climate crisis, the Green New Deal is also…
Read MoreRegenerative Agriculture: a Good Idea Until Corporations Got Hold of It
Food and agribusiness giants have coalesced around the term “regenerative agriculture” to signal their commitment to climate change and sustainability. This year’s COP28 will showcase regenerative agriculture prominently, and the term is gaining traction in policy circles, investor conferences and supermarket shelves. But it’s just the latest iteration of an on-going corporate strategy to undercut…
Read MoreA Localized Alternative to ‘Disaster Capitalism’
Like many disasters, Covid-19 shocked the world; like some disasters it changed the world economy in ways most of us did not predict. But let’s back up for moment. What if those post-disaster changes had indeed been predicted – planned even – by people long before the virus began its deadly spread? More than a…
Read MoreWhen Idiot Savants Do Climate Science
William Nordhaus, who turned 82 this year, was the first economist in our time to attempt to quantify the cost of climate change. His climate-modeling wizardry, which won him the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2018, has made him one of the world’s most consequential thinkers. His ideas have been adopted by the…
Read MoreWater Grabbing: Squeezing Communities Dry
In 2023 the United Nations’ authority on water warned that a global water crisis was imminent. For many communities, this crisis is already upon them, with water shortages affecting over a third of the world’s population, and many others dealing with devastating floods caused by climate change. The UN predicts the situation will get significantly…
Read MoreThe Green Revolution: no way to feed a hungry planet
Feeding a growing world population has been a serious concern for decades, but today there are new causes for alarm. Floods, heat waves and other weather extremes are making agriculture increasingly precarious, especially in the Global South. The war in Ukraine is also a factor. Russia is blockading Ukrainian grain exports, and fertilizer prices have…
Read MoreBicycles and Localization
World Celebration Days are ways to highlight a cause, to collectively focus and bring important ideas to public attention at the community level while uniting globally behind them. Several important days were packed into the month of June. These included World Bicycle Day, followed two days later by World Environment Day, and then World Localization…
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