Environment

On March 27, 2018, a Massachusetts judge found thirteen protestors who obstructed construction of a high-pressure fracked gas pipeline in West Roxbury, Massachusetts not responsible for their crime of trespassing and disturbing the peace. The judge ruled that the potential environmental and public health impacts of the pipeline – including the risk of climate change […]

Climate Crisis

“A Toothpick in a Tsunami”: US Big Oil Faces Bankruptcy as Prices Plunge 30% on Saudi Expansion

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Oil prices plummeted by 30% on Monday morning in Asia on news that Saudi Arabia intended actually to cut its prices and increase its production on April 1 to more than 10 million barrels a day. As a result, Asian markets also took a huge hit. Riyadh’s move came after […]

Green Transportation

Germany set to overtake China as Market Leader for Electric Cars in 2021 with Nearly 2 mn. to be Produced

Clean Energy Wire

By Sören Amelang | – ( Clean Energy Wire) – German carmakers VW, BMW and Daimler are set to overtake Chinese rivals to become global market leaders for electric cars from 2021, according to business consultancy McKinsey. The German trio will likely double their worldwide output to more than 1 million fully electric and plug-in […]

China

Maybe Try Friendship? Hatred and Enmity are bad Politics for America and a World in Crisis

Richard Penaskovic

We live in an era where animosity and even rage are the norm in the political arena. Both Democrats and Republicans are deeply divided in Congress so that little can be done legislatively. Correspondingly, millions of families are often split down the middle in terms of their political views with relatives divided among Democrats, Republicans […]

Bernie Sanders

Why the Russian Petro-state is actually terrified of a Bernie Sanders Presidency: The Green New Deal

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Russian President Vladimir Putin has been accused by Western intelligence agencies of seeking to interfere in the 2020 US elections in favor of Donald Trump on the right and in favor of Bernie Sanders on the left. But guess what, Russia doesn’t actually want Bernie to win. At all. Moscow […]

Acidification of Oceans

New Findings: 251.9 Million Years Ago Rapid Climate Change from CO2 Wiped out 90% of Species

The Conversation

By Jennifer Botha | – The end-Permian mass extinction is considered to be the most devastating biotic event in the history of life on Earth – it caused dramatic losses in global biodiversity, both in water and on land. About 90% of marine and 70% of terrestrial (land) species went extinct. This event may have […]

Climate Crisis

Methane Emissions Crisis and Rapid Global Heating: It is all Fossil Fuel Drilling and Fracking

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Many policy and scientific questions have the form of a Whodunnit. In what Umberto Eco called the “closed” mystery, the aftermath of a crime is described by the novelist but the identity and the motives of the killer are not known. A big mystery is where all the methane in […]

Climate Crisis

The unexpected link between the ozone hole and Arctic warming

The Conversation

By Karen Smith | – One of the earliest climate model predictions of how human-made climate change would affect our planet showed that the Arctic would warm about two to three times more than the global average. Forty years later, this “Arctic amplification” has been observed firsthand. Record-breaking Arctic warming and the dramatic decline of […]

Climate Crisis

Countering climate denialism requires taking on right-wing populism. Here’s how

The Conversation

By Richard Calland | – History may in due course record 2019 as the year in which the penny finally dropped about the climate emergency humanity faces. A sense of urgency was triggered last year by both Swedish teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg’s courage in challenging world leaders to take the crisis seriously, and the […]