Washington, D.C.—Global coal consumption rose 3 percent from 2012 to 2013, reaching over 3,800 million tons of oil equivalent (mtoe) in 2013. While the pace of growth is down from 7.1 percent in 2010, the continued increase in coal consumption and related carbon emissions is a cause for substantial concern among climate scientists.
Climate disruption jumped to the fore of the global political agenda in 2014 and a series of developments cemented both renewable energy and carbon pricing as lead solutions to the crisis.
Washington and Beijing struck a landmark deal to limit emissions, noted Canadian conservatives stepped forward to support emissions pricing, and the divestment movement moved from student union buildings to boardrooms, with many, from Catholic bishops to Rockefeller oil-fortune heirs, moving their money out of fossil fuels.
Thousands of protesters in Guangdong province forced the local government to soften its push to build a new chemical plant this month. Emboldened by extensive social media involvement, the protesters confronted the Maoming government on its plan, and won.
Thousands of protesters in Guangdong province forced the local government to soften its push to build a new chemical plant this month. Emboldened by extensive social media involvement, the protesters confronted the Maoming government on its plan, and won.
LISLE-SUR-TARN, France — The protests began a year ago in this quiet corner of southwestern France, as a small and peaceful gathering of hippies, environmental activists and utopians of all types set up tents to oppose the construction of a nearby dam.
In August, after local authorities sent diggers and then crushing machines to level the soil and destroy trees, clashes erupted between protesters and the police, turning this vast stretch of woodland into what many here called a war zone.
The European Union has backed off a plan to label oil from Alberta's oilsands as dirtier than other oils and to make it harder to import.
The European Commission, the EU's executive arm, published a proposal early Tuesday that removes one of the biggest hurdles that was standing in the way of Canada exporting its oil directly to Europe, something that isn't currently happening in any significant way.
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The move comes at a time when tensions are rising between Europe and its top oil supplier, Russia.
It's necessary to "degrow" the "corporate food regime" that over last five decades has impoverished the climate, water resources, local communities and crop diversity, and has not solved the problem of hunger.
This was the argument made by Eric Holt-Giménez, Executive Director of Food First, an organization whose mission is to work towards ending hunger by bringing about food justice, at a presentation Friday at the Fourth International Conference on Degrowth for Ecological Sustainability and Social Equity, which took place in Leipzig, Germany.
Do you remember when this socialism collapsed and there was all this talk about the death of socialism and the death of Marxism? At the time, Eduardo Galeano, a Uruguayan writer that all of you know, said that they had invited us to a funeral we did not belong at. The socialism that died was not the socialist project we had fought for. What happened in reality had little to do with the kind of society Marx and Engel envisaged would replace capitalism. For them, socialism was impossible without popular participation.
Among the many good points Thomas Piketty makes in Capital in the 21st Century – his world-changing but surprisingly mild book – is that extreme inequality can be sustained politically only through an “apparatus of justification.”(9) If voters can be persuaded that insane levels of inequality are sane, reasonable and even necessary, then the concentration of income can keep growing. If they can’t, then either states are forced to act, or revolutions happen.
