The 26th United Nations Conference of the Parties (COP-26), scheduled to open on 10/31/21 in Glasgow, Scotland. COP brings wealthy and developing nations together to discuss fighting climate change as one entity. The conference for this year will attempt to finish the rules for the carbon market, not completed at...
Prices are going to rise, probably exponentially, over the next few decades. The reason for that's simple: everything, more or less, has been artificially cheap. The costs of everything from carbon to fascism to ecological collapse to social fracture haven't been factored in — ever, from the beginning of the industrial age....
There’s no time to lose. The new research led by the French team confirms that whether we like it or not, human civilisation is in the midst of the most rapid transformation of the global energy system we’ve ever experienced. And hanging on for dear life to the old, dying...
Schumer Says White House Talks with GOP on Infrastructure Hit ‘a Brick Wall’. Politico reported: Bipartisan infrastructure talks between President Joe Biden and GOP Sen. Shelley Moore Capito are over, according to an administration official. The president will now focus on working with a bipartisan group of 20 senators. Biden...
We’re seeing more and more stories that Liz Cheney is about to be tossed under the bus, that the Republican “leadership” is so in thrall to Trump and his base, so dedicated to the service of Trump’s ego and his lies, that they are preparing to cast Cheney into the...
Armed with a civil war sword, Bruce Westerman (R-AR) crouched on a commode, ready for a last stand because the lost cause insurrectionists were crashing and trashing Capitol offices. Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy abandoned Westerman to an uncertain fate, because McCarthy’s security deemed him not important enough to save. ““Westerman, the only...
Peak cynicism has arrived. Tucker Carlson pimps a version of the nanny-state with more police confrontations because he thinks cops should stop children from wearing masks by enforcing child abuse laws. Apparently making a child wear a mask is like punching them in the face or the equivalent of exhibitionism....
Received this e-mail today from Finance Committee Chairman, U.S. Senator Ron Wyden’s (D. OR) re-election campaign: x It’s past time to end the federal prohibition of cannabis. @SenBooker @SenSchumer and I are working hard to get it done this year.— Ron Wyden (@RonWyden) April 21, 2021 I've been asked a...
One of the more despicable senators in the US Senate now acknowledges that climate change is real after four years of kissing Trump’s ass as the know-nothing did all he could do to derail the fight against climate change and kill life on the planet. Better late than never, but words...
Do we really have the will to prosecute Trump for anything? Or will he escape yet again because he’ll try to bargain his way out of an indictment because he holds something, something national security secret. This is probably how Kushner guaranteed his safety after leaving the Trump regime. For...
Saturday was the first day that CO2 measured in the atmosphere was above 420 ppm since measurements began in the 1950s. This moment in time has sapiens in a perilous position of our own making where CO2 in the atmosphere is almost 50% higher than it was since the industrial revolution. Just a wisp...
Change as a rising tide seems to be falling short as history’s stream is not as mighty. Apparently slavery is still “ordained by God for ultimate good” at Baylor University, as a RW campus group wants to accuse the University of canceling its “Christian identity”. No mention of its athletic team’s...
Like Martin Luther objecting to Pope Leo X selling indulgences to raise money for a variety of excesses, the environmental costs of carbon markets far exceed the benefits. Austerity would have denied us Renaissance art which is less at risk in an age of non-fungible tokens. Today the consequences for the planet...
The stuck ship does tell us something about the fragility of global trade and the flow of capital. Fungible Space Logistics, that concept popularized by United Parcel Service is also about the spatial problems of concrete versus abstract global networks. x Everyone is talking about the big ship getting stuck...
Rye Development is proposing a massive pumped storage power plant uphill from the site of the closed Goldendale smelter, next to the Columbia River. This facility will take over a closed pumped storage plant. Native American tribes, including tribes from Asia, originally migrated to this vicinity as a group with common languages and...
He’s not the only one, of course. For instance, I’m convinced Matt Gaetz has the largest head-to-brain-size ratio in the animal kingdom and that Louie Gohmert is the lamentable result of a failed attempt to breed a white supremacist lemur with a bowl of beets. Then there’s Lauren Boebert and Marjorie...
The sparse number of actual carbon capture and sequestration projects plus weak carbon markets amplify the problems of the climate crisis yet to be revisited, post-Trump. Two heartland examples in North Dakota and Texas show how there are several interlocking problems addressing the climate crisis that must be included in future environmental policy. More specifically...
In particular Bill Gates pontifications under his label of the “Good Billionaire”. Yes he does keep to the science in a way, but please stop with the hypocrisy. If there is a credibility gap in listening to Gates on this subject, it comes from the suspicion that he lives in...
“In all things of nature, there is something of the marvelous.” ~ Aristotle It is a fact that the biggest threat to our species is not climate change, though it will likely end much of what we experience today, but rather our war on bio-diversity. Bio-diversity is under attack from...
Ted Cruz and I share exactly two things in common. We both convert oxygen to carbon dioxide and we both love The Princess Bride. I’m not happy about it, and more than once it’s forced me to question my life choices. If I share that with Cruz, what else might we have...
As Climate Crisis returns to the new US administration agenda, negative emissions technologies (NETs) may find their implementation hindered by neoliberal financialization. An earlier ACM story showed how Steve Keen’s critique of Nordhaus’s use of discounting climate change demonstrates that orthodox economics is incapable of accelerating innovation especially in...
The best explanation of short selling (as it applies to GameStop) that I've read pic.twitter.com/o9ZL5HqsKf — John M. Cunningham (@jmcunning) January 28, 2021 1/2Short selling means borrowing shares and immediately selling them. When the price goes down, they buy them back for cents and return them to the lender. This...
I keep vigil. Last summer, record-breaking wildfires in Siberia, “in and around the Arctic circle,” continue to smolder and burn; the fuel feeding the fires is peat, decomposing organic matter that has been stored in the earth for millenniums. According to NASA estimates, at least half of wildfires burned in Siberia in the...
Eunice Foote was born in NY state in 1819. She had gone to university at the Troy Female Seminary (N/K/A Emma Willard School), where she was encouraged to attend a nearby college to study science. It was there where she learned her scientific skills for her free-thinking experiments. In fact, she was not...
“Pena que a cavalaria brasileira não tenha sido tão eficiente quanto a americana, que exterminou os índios” “It’s a shame that the Brazilian cavalry hasn’t been as efficient as the Americans, who exterminated the Indians.” Jair Bolsanaro via Correio Braziliense newspaper Brazil’s president, Jair Bolsanaro, may face charges for crimes against...
We were warned, now a new study has determined that the Earth’s plants' ability to sequester carbon emissions through photosynthesis will be halved by the 2030s or 2040s from what it is today at ten percent. That kind of loss will turn the natural world into a heat and carbon source, bringing...
We were warned, now a new study has determined that the Earth’s plants’ ability to sequester carbon emissions through photosynthesis will be halved by the 2030s or 2040s from what it is today at ten percent. That kind of loss will turn the natural world into a heat and carbon source, bringing...
A senior Biden climate team transition official alerted E&E News that the damage Trump and his fossil fuel grifters (that have held power over the agencies tasked with protecting the climate system) have been successful in hollowing out the EPA of staff and resources at a time when the “ability to...
M-i-c-k-e-y, Why because we like it. M-M-MMT. “We collectively decide just what counts as a resource, economic base, or productive work.” OTOH, it could all be trippin’ on bong hits. The superlative science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson’s latest novel, The Ministry For The Future, is essentially about using MMT to...
The neoliberals’ “free market” is not going to sequester enough carbon to save the environment. Even Warren Buffett isn’t willing to take a bet on surviving an impending climate crisis catastrophe, because “the rents are too high”. Existential threats have a critical reality, about which ruthless criticism is entailed. Even...
Is the Market for Lemons like the market for lemonade or even Don Lemon. Asymmetric information is everywhere, the example of the used-car salesman synonymous with the reign of Trump, best exemplified by his disinformation complicity shared by hiring as Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, chairman and chief executive officer of ExxonMobil from...
I have to admit, I always forget about my War on Christmas obligations — which include buying the “Fuck Christmas!” cookies and hanging mistletoe over the latest amalgam of carbon atoms and flop sweat passing itself off as Rudy Giuliani — until I’m reminded about the importance of the season by...
Unlike one of her predecessors, who had numerous connections to the Trump impeachment and its hinky relations with the Russian oligarchs, Jennifer Granholm will combine clean energy policy and economic recovery. Even without explicit support for the GND, this is a direction 180 degrees from the prior administration's kowtowing to...
Tom Vilsack returns to the position he held during the Obama administration at USDA. Why hasn’t the pandemic compelled a rethinking of factory farming. Changing trends toward sustainability must show that the structure of industry needs to change. We’ll see. At least Biden is motivated by actual contacts rather than seeing...
Donald Trump has been plotting to screw our climate and kill off the diversity of life for four years. This isn’t hyperbole; he has devasted critical habitat and created scars over 400 miles long through National Parks, private and public lands along the US and Mexican borders with his racist wall. By changing...
We will remember 2020 as the good old days as the climate continues to overheat due to our failure to rein in heat-trapping fossil fuel emissions. Heck, this year might even be the coolest we will experience for an unknowable number of Millenium. We have entered perilous times, and physics will...
“Until now, Donald Trump served as a support for the Brazilian president to act irresponsibly. Now with the U.S. adding to Europe’s pressure, Brazil is more isolated, and the government will find it harder to stay on this foolish path.” Alessandro Molon, the opposition Brazilian Socialist Party The Amazon is half...
This is remarkable. Ivanka tweets some gobbledygook about how daddy has reduced greenhouse gas emissions by nearly 10 percent last year. This is a lie; the emissions drop she references is not from 2019, but 2020. Sneaky she is. And the drop in emissions is due to daddy’s ineptitude in dealing...
“It’s gotten so out of whack that we are now looking at survival for our children, not survival of our grandchildren.”, Peter Carter, M.D., – reviewer for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and founder of the Climate Emergency Institute. Dozens of scientists from Sweden, Russia, China, and seven other countries studied methane emissions...
“It’s gotten so out of whack that we are now looking at survival for our children, not survival of our grandchildren.”, Peter Carter, M.D., – reviewer for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and founder of the Climate Emergency Institute. Dozens of scientists from Sweden, Russia, China, and seven other countries studied methane emissions...
The crises facing the country are severe — from a pandemic to an economic recession, climate change to racial injustice — and the transition team will continue preparing at full speed so that the Biden-Harris Administration can hit the ground running on Day One. Biden Transition Team As I write...
My hope is that victory is so risibly out of reach for the odious squash rind on election night that he dissolves into a cloud of individual carbon atoms and deep-seated shame, but that’s not his plan. He’s going to loudly declare victory if the count is anywhere near close for...
If we lose the Arctic, we lose the whole world. President Niinistö of Finland There is a record open ocean in the Arctic as a delayed freeze in sea ice formation due to record-shattering heat in the Laptev Sea. Siberia has been freakishly hot recently, resulting in the loss of bone-chilling winds...
If you give a climate arsonist four more years in the White House, why would anyone be surprised if we have more of America ablaze — Joe Biden Vice President Joe Biden’s climate plan has received rave reviews across the planet. Many have hope that the United States carrot and...
Yale Environment 360 notes “just as global warming has propelled the Arctic Ocean past a tipping point which will lead to a largely ice-free Arctic in summer in the coming decades. Wildfire scientists say that rising global temperatures and worsening droughts mean that the world has entered a new era...
“'Tis the time's plague when madmen lead the blind.” William Shakespeare The evil of science deniers recently has been beyond the pale. Not content with killing the planet over climate change, and sowing doubt over vaccines the far-right conspiracy theorists have a new target to haunt the world with the crazy,...
Slate Magazine has a new piece out about the upcoming U.S. Senate race between incumbent U.S. Senator Susan Collins (R. ME) and Maine House Speaker Sara Gideon (D. ME): Six years ago, Karin Leuthy, a registered Democrat, voted for Republican Sen. Susan Collins. Like many Mainers, Leuthy, 48, took pride...
“Oh yes Sapiens, you hungry little monkey, it's all about you” comment via Greenland Ice Sheet — Ice Sheet Melting Is Perfectly in Line With Our Worst-Case Scenario, Scientists Warn New research has found that 50-70% of Antarctica's glacier marine extensions are at risk of hydrofracture due to enormous meltwater lakes on the...
I’m Red Woodman, Senior Investigator for what we call the “Frog Court.” If I can just get through today, I can retire with a pension. But a whole bunch of new cases just hit my in-basket and I came to work to find a guy sobbing over a couple of baby...
Human consumption and climate change have sent humanity on a steep, dangerous, and deadly spiral spin toward a “catastrophic collapse” warn researchers. The dire warning is published in the scientific journal Nature Scientific Reports. Physicists Mauro Bologna and Gerardo Aquino layout in their research that there will be a ninety percent chance...
