Environment

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Julien Mieville at AFP asks the big question: Has global demand for petroleum peaked? The meme of “peak oil” once referred to the notion that production would at some point peak and then fall, driving prices sky high, but that theory developed before the fracking revolution and was never very […]

Climate Crisis

The Corporations that are Swinging behind Green Energy may make all the Difference in Climate Emergency

The Conversation

By Zdravka Tzankova | – The Research Brief is a short take about interesting academic work. The big idea My new analysis of companies that seek to buy renewable electricity finds that business is becoming a powerful new ally in the U.S. political battle to stop climate change. Driven by pressure from environmental groups and […]

Climate Crisis

Baghdad Bob on the Potomac: Trump’s Hoaxes, from “Disappearing” Covid-19 to Climate to Russiagate

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Authoritarian regimes breed lies like rotting meat breeds maggots, and as Trump marches the United States into an imperial presidency beyond accountability, his rate of lying has become astronomical. If I just read ten a day, it would take me five and a half years just to read all 20,000 […]

Climate Crisis

New research shows the South Pole is warming faster than the rest of the world

The Conversation

By Kyle Clem | – Climate scientists long thought Antarctica’s interior may not be very sensitive to warming, but our research, published today, shows a dramatic change. Over the past 30 years, the South Pole has been one of the fastest changing places on Earth, warming more than three times more rapidly than the rest […]

Climate Change

How Modern Human-Driven Climate Change began with European colonisation, mass slavery and the ‘great dying’ of the 16th century

The Conversation

By Mark Maslin and Simon Lewis | – The toppling of statues at Black Lives Matter protests has powerfully articulated that the roots of modern racism lie in European colonisation and slavery. Racism will be more forcefully opposed once we acknowledge this history and learn from it. Geographers and geologists can help contribute to this […]

Climate Crisis

100 degrees in Siberia? Top 5 ways burning Coal, Gasoline is causing Astonishing Transformation of Arctic

The Conversation

This Arctic heat wave has been unusually long-lived. The darkest reds on this map of the Arctic are areas that were more than 14 degrees Fahrenheit warmer in the spring of 2020 compared to the recent 15-year average. Joshua Stevens/NASA Earth Observatory By Mark Serreze, University of Colorado Boulder The Arctic heat wave that sent […]

Climate Crisis

The other Pandemic: Siberia hits over 100° F, hotter than Miami, 80 Years Early, because Coal and Gasoline

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – As if the coronavirus pandemic, depression-era unemployment, and a mad President in the White House were not enough, Mother Nature has decided to remind us what the Big Kahuna really is. It is the climate emergency. May was not only the hottest May since 1880, it was 18° F. (10° […]

Climate Crisis

How the Coronavirus could be a Climate Game Changer if it shifts 30% of Jobs Online

Clean Energy Wire

By Sören Amelang | – ( Clean Energy Wire) – The coronavirus pandemic has boosted digitalisation because it forced many people to do without business trips, work remotely and shop online, which offers new opportunities for climate protection, according to analysis commissioned by Germany’s environment ministry. “We are experiencing a break with many routines we […]

Climate Crisis

The Other Pandemic: We haven’t Even begun to Flatten the Curve on the Climate Crisis

H. Patricia Hynes

Greenfield, Mass. (Special to Informed Comment) – We are living with two life-threatening crises: Covid-19 and the climate crisis. They pose a common stark fate for us – the risk of illness in the case of Covid, and injury and destruction of our environment in the case of climate; both are harbingers of death for […]