Reading Time: 4 minutes I live in Queens, in a neighborhood that’s bisected by the Grand Central Parkway. Along the side of the highway, there’s a buffer zone: a strip of land between the highway guardrails and the residential neighborhood on the other side, enclosed by chain-link fencing. In that no-man’s-land, spindly trees grow and weedy undergrowth proliferates. It’s […]
environmentalism
Posted inPolitics
Libertarians in the desert—an update
Reading Time: 4 minutes The desert town of Rio Verde Foothills ought to be a lesson in what happens when you buy a home in places without the resources needed for human life. But some people are doing their utmost not to learn that lesson.
Posted inClimate Crisis
Military emissions, climate funds, and a hard road to COP28
Reading Time: 6 minutes This month, the Common Wealth Climate and Community Project released an assessment of US and UK military emissions since the Paris Agreement in 2015. The numbers, drawn from the military’s “opaque” reporting (i.e., much is not disclosed for security reasons) are predictably not great: together, they produced at least 430 million tCO2e (tons of CO2-equivalent […]
Posted inFree Expression
How do we make protests work for climate change reform?
Reading Time: 10 minutes One frightfully “woke” day in April 1970, some 20 million US citizens across 2,000 colleges and 10,000 grade schools participated in a “teach-in” about environmental crisis and stewardship. Some took part in active demonstrations, cleaning up facets of their communities or marching in the streets. Others engaged in lectures and sit-ins to improve awareness of […]
Posted inBooks
How do we talk about impending doom so that people will listen?
Reading Time: 7 minutes Can books like Kim Stanley Robinson’s ‘The Ministry for the Future’ offer a useful narrative vocabulary for hashing out possible solutions to our overheating world?
Posted inEnvironment
How to be a better armchair activist
Reading Time: 12 minutes Plenty of media can make us better armchair activists. The challenge is to hold competing ideas in tension, because real-world policy doesn’t exist in a vacuum.
Posted inClimate Crisis
Bad sky, gods angry
Reading Time: 4 minutes The unnatural sight of a smoke-clouded sky triggers a primeval instinct in us. We don’t have to cower from nature as our ancestors did, but we should treat it as a sign that we need to change course.
Posted inClimate Crisis
New York makes the Green New Deal a reality
Reading Time: 4 minutes The Build Public Renewables Act takes New York State one big step toward a better future.
Posted inPolitics
Why libertarian cities fail
Reading Time: 5 minutes Freedom-loving libertarians who build communities under the assumption that natural resources are unlimited discover, to their dismay, that this isn’t so.
Posted inClimate Crisis
The world’s still burning: IPCC’s climate report and action plan
Reading Time: 6 minutes Last week, Nature Human Behavior published “Negativity drives online news consumption”, a study that found a strong connection between negative headlines and higher click-through rates. But desensitization is also a significant risk when grim news abounds, as it has in recent weeks (and months, and years). The latest meeting between war crimes suspect Vladimir Putin […]