This past weekend’s “news” is cynical and slightly morbid, I know, but you can’t say “The Onion” doesn’t zing us with its truthiness.
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Category Archives: articles, books, conferences, videos, special events etc.
Keystone XL Truth
I wrote here recently about Tom Steyer and his mission to stop the pipeline. He, along with Bill McKibben, 350.org, the Sierra Club, and a growing universe of activists are building what we all hope is an inarguable case against the pipeline and the tar sands. We are trying to make the movement against KXL inexorable.
Here is the first of Tom Steyer’s video spots, airing nationally, against the pipeline and the tar sands. For more, go to Keystone Truth and to Steyer’s NextGen Climate Action.
Don’t believe Tom Steyer? How about 21 Nobel peace and science laureates? They’re against the tar sands too and want the EU to immediately implement its Fuel Quality Directive. This would ban tar sands oil from Europe.
Nero’s Still Fiddling
(graphic from The Ecologist)
I can’t really say it often enough: nuclear power is a scandal. It’s squandered trillions of dollars, generated waste that will be lethal for hundreds of thousands of years, blighted vast areas of Japan and the Ukraine – and is still an accident waiting to happen. But, you say, in this age of warming, we need clean nuclear power to cut our greenhouse gas emissions. Utter, unadulterated, dangerously stupid bullshit! Okay? Can it be said any more clearly than that? Part of the extraordinary tragedy of commercial nuclear power is the fact that while the planet is truly burning, the Nukefists are fiddling away time, money, expertise and political will with this proven outrage of a technology. Continue reading
In The New Yorker
I’ve got a letter this week in the venerable New Yorker. Nicholas Lemann wrote an article there a few weeks ago about the first Earth Day and the state of the environmental movement today. It was, in a word, uninformed. I had a few bones to pick, so I wrote a letter.
I’m delighted, of course, that the good editors at the New Yorker saw fit to print my note. I am in excellent company, along with Fred Krupp, President of the Environmental Defense Fund, and Robert A. Low, a former top NYC environmental official.
They made some salient points as correctives to Lemann’s article as did I. The edited letter from me points out the really quite vigorous state of environmental activism in the US today, not to mention in the world beyond, and its effectiveness. Continue reading
The Denialists Have No Clothes
Do the Math – The Movie
I went to a great event last night: the premiere of “Do the Math.” It’s a powerful short (45-minute) documentary about what the indomitable Bill McKibben and 350.org have set in motion with their stunning and timely movement to get universities and others to divest from the fossil fuel industry. I wrote about what I called McKibben’s Manifesto, a blockbuster piece in Rolling Stone last summer and a call to arms. I subsequently wrote about the first stirrings of the divestment movement. Well, the movement has grown exponentially in only a few months: as of today, there are initiatives at 302 colleges and universities, in 74 cities and states, and beyond. Seattle Mayor Mike McGinn, for one, has already set the wheels in motion in his city. See what Fossil Free is doing and how you can get on board. Continue reading
Climate in Cambridge
We’ve been up visiting in Cambridge Mass. and have had the opportunity to see a couple of exhibits about climate change in our peregrinations. The photo here is from GlacierWorks, an organization founded by David Breashears, a documentary filmmaker who is on a mission to highlight the stunning loss of glacial mass in the Himalayas over the past hundred years. There is an exhibit now at the MIT Museum, Rivers of Ice: Vanishing Glaciers of the Greater Himalaya, that illustrates what’s happening there. It’s all pretty arresting. Continue reading
Carpe Diem
Carpe diem. Seize the day. That’s what some American university students are realizing needs to be done. I was in the streets in the early ‘70s protesting the war. I even wound up in jail a couple of times. One of the proudest things I can say about that time is that I was in jail with the legendary peace activist Dave Dellinger for three days. It’s good to be young and to know what’s at stake. Continue reading
Inside the Climate Wars
Frontline has produced pretty consistently terrific programs over the years. I use both Hot Politics and Heat in my classes on climate change and on energy and the environment. Another blockbuster program, Climate of Doubt, hit the airwaves this past week on PBS. It looks very closely at the industry that has grown up around climate change denialism. It pinpoints the fact that many millions of dollars have been spent by the likes of ExxonMobil and the Koch Brothers to fund this industry. It documents the havoc that this disinformation campaign has caused. Continue reading
Lightweighting Vehicles
The demand destruction of oil for transportation, as I wrote recently, is in train. (See Houston, You’ve Got a Problem.) One of the key factors in this trend is the electrification of light-duty vehicles. In order to fully realize this potential, though, it will be necessary for automakers to significantly reduce the weight of their cars and trucks.