Trump’s Climate Denial Is A Gift To China
Called the “1+N” framework, China’s climate policy is an all-of-government, all-of-society blueprint for the country’s decarbonization. Its foundational documents — the “1” document and the first “N” document (the first of a series of directives for the practical applications of the laws in the “1” document) — were released in 2021. As this framework is built […]
Climate Change Could Cut the Economy in Half. We’re Not Ready for It.
Mainstream economic ideas about the relationship between the biosphere and the economy are founded on assumptions, conjectures, and stipulations that have contradictory evidence, or no evidence, to back them up.
The Fossil Fuels Conversation Needs a Hard Reset
The world’s climate scientists say that already existing fossil-energy infrastructure is projected to emit the total carbon budget for halting global heating at 2 degrees Celsius over preindustrial temperatures. This statement means … that the world cannot develop any more coal, oil, or gas, if we want our planet to remain relatively livable.
Democrats are Letting Trump’s Climate Lies Take Hold
Those who live not in conspiracy but reality must offer voters a story, grounded in facts and pointing to America’s loftiest ideals, about the threat of climate change, the villainy of those who are making it worse, and the new, clean-energy economy that can be built with hope and ingenuity, which will bring immediate benefits […]
How Harris Can Put Trump on the Defensive Over Fracking
Instead of getting baited into a he said, she said dispute about a fracking ban, Harris should simply say that she’s for “freedom of energy choice.”
The New Climate Denial Is Based on These Six Terms
“Fossil-fuel propaganda is spun out of six key terms that dominate the language of climate politics: alarmist, cost, growth, ‘India and China’, innovation, and resilience. Together these terms weave a narrative that goes something like this: ‘Yes, climate change is real, but calling it an existential threat is just alarmist. And, anyway, phasing out coal, oil, and gas would cost […]
The Secret Weapon of Climate Negotiations: Language
“Moving forward, journalists—and citizens as well—should recognize that oil and gas producers increasingly sound like climate advocates, using the same words and phrases that call for the end of the fossil fuel era. This is their new greenwashing strategy. It is all the more important never to take anyone’s words at face value, but to […]
The New UN Climate Report Airs the Dirty Truth About Fossil Fuels
“The IPCC’s statement signals the time for playing pretend is over. No country or leader can excuse more new coal, oil or gas development with fossil fuel producers’ false promises of magically effective technologies to reduce or recapture fossil energy emissions. The world must halt new fossil fuel development and dismantle current fossil energy infrastructure […]
The Epic of Survival
“The genre that offers us [a] pattern of extended political struggle is, of course, the epic. Its sweeping, episodic, iterative form attempts to narrate the labor of overthrowing an old or illegitimate order and building a new world. It tells stories about fighting to shape history. (If the idea of shaping history seems impossibly naive […]
Carbon Removal Isn’t the Solution to Climate Change
“The models saying ‘we need CDR’ are not establishing scientific facts. They are positing political futures…The whole idea of carbon removal was developed to keep the fossil-fuel system going.”