Climate Change, Up Close and Personal
The refusal of the United States and fellow rich nations to compensate developing countries for the devastation wrought by air pollution and climate change smacks of a kind of modern colonialism at its worst.
A study published earlier this year found that shifting from fossil fuels to renewables would add eight million jobs worldwide, boosting overall employment in the energy sector by more than 40% by 2050.
Why do we tolerate the massive environmental impacts of the very rich?
These are dark times, but hope is not lost nor foolish, and change has already begun.
Since 1880, average global sea levels have risen by more than 8 inches (23 centimeters), and the rate has been accelerating with climate change.
‘Simply teaching kids about the science of the climate crisis, without giving them a way to engage, can do more harm than good, because it’s so disempowering and overwhelming.’
For all the obvious climate impacts, the United States does not yet seem disturbed enough to demonstrably disrupt our burning of fossil fuels.
The living world is being hit by everything at once: the only way to stop our full-spectrum assault on Earth systems is to reduce our economic activity.
A recent analysis on land use estimated that livestock production uses 83 percent of the world’s farmland, yet provides only 18 percent of the world’s total calories.
The primary cause of the worsening situation is not the combustion of fossil fuels, but the massive political dereliction that has allowed the bonfire to go on after we knew that it posed a potentially lethal threat to humankind.
“Governments’ failure to act on climate change in the face of overwhelming scientific evidence may well be the biggest intergenerational human rights violation in history.” —Agnès Callamard, Amnesty International
a squirrel is hurling insults, and beneath his screeches the cicadas
insist and sigh, insist and sigh, unmoved by his grandiloquent snit.
Movements such as the four-day workweek, right to disconnect, and fair workweek aim to save our sanity and the planet.