Climate Change

04/04/16
Author: 
Stefania Barca

Any just transition to a green economy must take place on labor’s terms — not capital’s.

Climate change must be stopped. But who will do the stopping? Who, in other words, could be the political subject of an anticapitalist climate revolution?
31/03/16

Arctic sea ice reached a record winter low this year — the latest mark in a season that has left scientists gape-mouthed in amazement.

"I’ve never seen such a warm, crazy winter in the Arctic,” said an email from Mark Serreze, director of the U.S.-based National Snow and Ice Data Center. "The heat was relentless."

Serreze's group declared Monday that the maximum extent of sea ice before it begins its spring melt was 20,000 square kilometres less this winter than it has ever been since satellite monitoring began. The record had been set only last year.

23/03/16
Author: 
A. J. Turner, D. J. Jacob, J. Benmergui, S. C. Wofsy, J. D. Maasakkers, A. Butz, O. Hasekamp, S. C. Biraud

[Webpage editor's note: This scientific paper has great significance for the plans in BC to create a large fracking/LNG industry. The implication that the increase in methane emissions in the US may be partly due to oil and gas development is another reason to reject claims that BC LNG would reduce world-wide emissions by replacing coal in Asia.]

23/03/16
Author: 
Bill McKibben

Our leaders thought fracking would save our climate. They were wrong.

Global warming is, in the end, not about the noisy political battles here on the planet’s surface. It actually happens in constant, silent interactions in the atmosphere, where the molecular structure of certain gases traps heat that would otherwise radiate back out to space. If you get the chemistry wrong, it doesn’t matter how many landmark climate agreements you sign or how many speeches you give. And it appears the United States may have gotten the chemistry wrong. Really wrong.

23/03/16
Author: 
Sean Sweeney
image from Facing up to the failure of carbon markets

The 2015 Paris Climate Agreement and the “intended nationally determined contributions”submitted to the UNFCCC enshrines carbon markets and emissions trading schemes (ETSs) as a key mechanism for reducing emissions. But are carbon markets effective?

21/03/16
Author: 
John Schwartz
Bill McKibben was arrested during a protest at Seneca Lake near Reading, N.Y., on March 7. He was protesting the proposed expansion of a natural gas storage facility. Credit Monica Lopossay for The New York Times

READING, N.Y. — They came here to get arrested.

Nearly 60 protesters blocked the driveway of a storage plant for natural gas on March 7. Its owners want to expand the facility, which the opponents say would endanger nearby Seneca Lake. But their concerns were global, as well.

“There’s a climate emergency happening,” one of the protesters, Coby Schultz, said. “It’s a life-or-death struggle.”

14/03/16
Author: 
Mike De Sousa
Photo courtesy of Josh Berson/SHARE 

 

Many large Canadian companies are financing legal action and lobbying against President Barack Obama’s climate change plan, putting the public and their investors at risk, said a new report released on Monday by an investment services organization.

14/03/16
Author: 
Damian Carrington and Michael Slezak
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/mar/14/february-breaks-global-temperature-records-by-shocking-amount
Drought-hit land in Thailand. Photograph: Rungroj Yongrit/EPA

Warnings of climate emergency after surface temperatures 1.35C warmer than average temperature for the month

14/03/16
Author: 
John Foran

We are living through an unprecedented crisis, in a world beset by massive social problems – the obscene poverty and inequality that neoliberal capitalist globalization has wreaked on at least two-thirds of humanity, the immobility of the political elite almost everywhere, and cultures of violence that poison our lives from the most intimate relations to the mass murder of the world’s wars.

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