Super Storms

Saudi Aramco Reports Gargantuan $161 Bn in Profits, But will Electric Cars kill the Oil Market within 2 Decades?

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Dan Murphy at CNBC reports that the giant Saudi Aramco oil company posted an unprecedented profit of $161 billion for 2022. The company’s CEO, Amin Nasser, commented that this was probably the biggest profit ever made in the course of one year by any private company. Murphy reports that Nasser […]

Climate Crisis

Climate Change Impacts could Cost Germany up to Nearly $1 Trillion by 2050

Clean Energy Wire

By Carolina Kyllmann | – ( Clean Energy Wire ) – The consequences of climate change could cost Germany up to 900 billion euros by 2050, found a report by the Institute for Ecological Economy Research (IÖW), the Institute of Economic Structures Research (GWS) and consultancy Prognos AG. More frequent extreme weather events such as […]

Climate Crisis

Climate Emergency: Intense Downpours, Flash Floods will Increasingly Strike Britain

The Conversation

By Elizabeth Kendon, University of Bristol | – (The Conversation) – In July 2021, Kew in London experienced a month’s rain in just three hours. Across the city, tube lines were suspended and stations closed as London experienced its wettest day in decades and flash floods broke out. Just under two weeks later, it happened […]

Climate Crisis

Big Oil’s trade group allies outspent Clean Energy Groups by a Whopping 27x, with Billions in Ads and Lobbying to keep Fossil Fuels Flowing

The Conversation

By Christian Downie, Australian National University and Robert Brulle, Brown University | – (The Conversation) – You’ve probably seen ads promoting gas and oil companies as the solutions to climate change. They’re meant to be inspiring and hopeful, with scenes of a green, clean future. But shiny ads are not all these companies do to […]

Climate Crisis

“Some say the World will End in Fire, some say in Ice”: Life in a Climate-Destabilized California

Rebecca Gordon

( Tomdispatch.com ) – It was January 1983 and raining in San Francisco. The summer before, I’d moved here from Portland, Oregon, a city known for its perpetual gray drizzles and, on the 60-odd days a year when the sun deigns to shine, dazzling displays of greenery. My girlfriend had spent a year convincing me […]

Climate Crisis

Where the Climate Target of 1.5°C (2.7°F) Came from, and Why we must not Lose Sight of its Importance

The Conversation

By Piers Forster, University of Leeds | – The US economist William Nordhaus claimed as early as the 1970s, when scientific understanding of climate change was still taking shape, that warming of more than 2°C would “push global conditions past any point that any human civilisation had experienced”. By 1990, scientists had also weighed in: […]

Climate Crisis

Climate Change is increasing the Intensity of Tropical Storms, and even Weak ones are now Fiercer

The Conversation

Wei Mei, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Shang-Ping Xie, University of California, San Diego Tropical cyclones have been growing stronger worldwide over the past 30 years, and not just the big ones that you hear about. Our new research finds that weak tropical cyclones have gotten at least 15% more intense in […]

Climate Crisis

The Pakistani Mega-Flood and our Climate Emergency

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Here is a talk I recently gave about the mega-flood this fall in Pakistan, which affected 33 million people, inundated a third of the country at one point, and caused between $15 billion and $30 billion in damages, including to crops and food supplies at a time when the Ukraine […]

Australia

First-Nations-Led Youth Win Climate/ Human Rights Case against Mammoth Coal Mine in Australia

Juan Cole

By Justine Bell-James, The University of Queensland | – In a historic ruling today, a Queensland court has said the massive Clive Palmer-owned Galilee Basin coal project should not go ahead because of its contribution to climate change, its environmental impacts, and because it would erode human rights. The case was mounted in 2020 by […]