Reading Time: 4 minutes On January 24, the Science and Security Board of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists officially moved the hands on the Doomsday Clock, which for three quarters of a century has been used to depict humanity’s risk of global disaster from nuclear war. When the clock was first launched, on the cover of the June […]
climate change
Posted inSatire
Heavenly upgrade: God goes green
Reading Time: < 1 minute After several years of campaigning from environmental groups, God has finally agreed to upgrade all heaven’s light sources to compact fluorescent lamp (CFL) energy-saving bulbs. “This has been coming for a long, long time,” said Tony Green, co-author of How Many Gods Does It Take? and the chairman of Too Much Heaven, a loose organization of environmental groups […]
Posted inClimate Crisis
Four recent failures in climate change response
Reading Time: 6 minutes Welcome to 2023: another year of corporate and political mediocrity when it comes to climate change response. We’re in the middle of the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting, known colloquially as Davos after its Swiss Alps location, so rhetoric around climate change response (and related economic pressure points) is currently running hot. On Wednesday, an […]
Posted inDeep Dive
2022: The year in global review, Part I
Reading Time: 8 minutes All end-of-year lists are suspect. One must embrace futility when trying to summarize what happened on a planet of eight billion for one spin around the sun. So why do we do write them? At best, to break up our routines of knee-jerk outrage at the latest inane news item, and to think more systematically […]
Posted inEnvironment
COP15’s grand—and questionable—promise for biodiversity conservation
Reading Time: 4 minutes There are a few ways to read the major concluding deal from this year’s UN Biodiversity Conference (COP15), held in Montreal from December 7 to 19. Over 190 countries ultimately signed on to what is being called a historic deal, the “30×30” pledge to establish 30 percent of the Earth’s natural ecosystems (on land and […]
Posted inEnvironment
EU takes world-first step, banning products linked to deforestation
Reading Time: 3 minutes Change comes fast and slow, as the latest green deal out of the European Union (EU) amply illustrates. On December 6, the European Commission welcomed news of an agreement reached between EU’s parliament and a specific council established for the purposes of reducing Europe’s impact on global deforestation and forest degradation. Companies will now be […]
Posted inClimate Crisis
So what did COP27 actually accomplish?
Reading Time: 7 minutes From November 6 to 20, world leaders and representatives met for the 27th United Nations Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP27), held this year in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt. The conference started and ended late due to reluctance around one key initiative: the topic of loss and damage for vulnerable countries hit by climate change […]
Posted inThe Future
The longtermism that works—and the kind that doesn’t
Reading Time: 10 minutes In 2004, a tsunami and earthquake killed almost 230,000 people in 14 Indian Ocean countries. Many forms of relief then mouldered on the beaches—used clothes, high heel shoes, expired medicines—because “in-kind” donations are well known not to be effective forms of aid on a global scale. The wrong hair products to survivors of Hurricane Katrina. […]
Posted inEnvironment
Solar geoengineering: Can we buy time to heal climate change?
Reading Time: 5 minutes We can cool our warming planet by blocking sunlight in the atmosphere. Is this hubris or a way of mitigating the damage we’ve already done?
Posted inClimate Crisis
How much do religious Americans care about the planet?
Reading Time: 4 minutes Religious Americans say they care about the environment, but it’s less clear that this feel-good claim translates into action.