Mark Jacobson and Mark Delucchi have done it again. This time they’ve spelled out how 139 countries can each generate all the energy needed for homes, businesses, industry, transportation, agriculture—everything—from wind, solar and water power technologies, by 2050. Their national blueprints, released Nov. 18, follow similar plans they have published in the past few years to run each of the 50 U.S. states on renewables, as well as the entire world. (Have a look for yourself, at your country, using the interactive map below.)
Soon after the horrific terror attacks in Paris, last Friday, our phones filled with messages from friends and colleagues: “So are they going to cancel the Paris climate summit?” “The drums of war are beating. Count on climate change being drowned out.” The assumption is reasonable enough. While many politicians pay lip service to the existential urgency of the climate crisis, as soon as another more immediate crisis rears its head—war, a market shock, an epidemic—climate reliably falls off the political map.
If climate change is not brought under control, the world will face more humanitarian crises such as the one unfolding in Syria, one of the world's most prominent security experts warned.
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) director John Brennan said in a speech Tuesday morning that climate change causing compromised access to food and water “greatly increases the prospect for famine and deadly epidemics.”
The shocking photograph of Aylan Kurdi lying dead on a Turkey beach made many wake up to the horrifying reality of the crisis but, although most of us now know that millions of people have been displaced from their homes in the nation to escape civil war and persecution, there are many who may not actually understand what is happening over in Syria.
That’s why this helpful cartoon has been produced in an attempt to try and help people understand the situation in the country and how and why it has happened and escalated to such an extent.
Representatives of nearly the entire U.S. fossil fuels industry lined up on Thursday to help the federal government wage a legal battle against a group of young people—aged 8 to 19—who are demanding climate policies that respect the rights of current and future generations.
The military is not just a prolific user of oil, it is one of the central pillars of the global fossil-fuel economy. Today whether it is in the Middle East, the Gulf, or the Pacific, modern-day military deployment is about controlling oil-rich regions and defending the key shipping supply routes that carry half the world’s oil and sustain our consumer economy.
Business, environmental and community groups are pushing for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to shut down a pair of pipeline reviews before heading to Paris for climate talks.
The City of Burnaby, the Georgia Strait Alliance, Greenpeace Canada and the Natural Resources Defense Council are among 100 groups seeking a halt to National Energy Board reviews of Kinder Morgan’s Trans Mountain expansion and TransCanada’s Energy East proposal. In a joint letter sent Thursday to Trudeau, the groups say the reviews should be put on pause until fundamental flaws in the process are fixed.
“The TPP is an act of climate denial,” said Jason Kowalski, the U.S. policy director at 350.org.
“It denies the scientific imperative to leave fossil fuels in the ground by granting corporations incredible powers over the sovereign right of countries to fight climate change on their own.”
At issue is the investor state dispute settlement (ISDS) mechanism included in the trade deal. ISDS’s allow foreign investors to use a secret tribunal to launch a lawsuit if they believe government actionsmight affect their future profits.
