Nature: A wasted decade of climate inaction shows us that incremental shifts that might have been sufficient at one time are no longer enough. A rapid shift with 4x the work or a third the time is necessary now. Some have stopped fossil fuel production and exploration, but not US

04 March 2020, Nature. Emissions: world has four times the work or one-third of the time: New synthesis shows what a wasted decade means for the climate pact made in Paris. Nature 579, 25-28 (2020) doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-020-00571-x, https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00571-x The past decade of political failure on climate change has cost us all dearly. It has shrunk the time left for action by two-thirds. …

Arts and culture in just transition organizing

Excerpt, Common Dreams, May 2021, https://www.commondreams.org/views/2021/05/14/arts-and-culture-just-transition A central feature of the failed neoliberal experiment was the understanding that inequality of wealth and rights was accepted as a feature and force of economic growth, as Shoshanna Zuboff articulated in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. In fact, our neoliberal economic system requires a continual supply of cheap land, natural resources, and labor to generate never …

Leading health damages from vehicle pollution in 12 states and Washington, DC: Ammonia emissions alone cause 10% of early deaths. The largest health damages were $4 million for every ton of particulate matter emitted. Ozone and fine particulate matter from vehicle emissions in 2016 led to an estimated 7,100 deaths in the NE and Mid-Atlantic regions of the US.

A new study that quantifies the total and interstate deaths from transportation-related air pollution from five vehicle types in 12 states and Washington, D.C. has been published in Environmental Research Letters. The research was led by researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with the Center for Climate, Health, and the Global Environment at Harvard T.H Chan School …

Is Free Public Transit an Idea Whose Time Has Come?

By SANDY SMITH, Next City, MAY 19, 2021 New York City’s Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) is one of several large public-transit agencies contemplating a fare-free future. (Photo by Adjoajo/CC BY-SA 4.0) The debate over transportation equity has heated up, given the sharp change in transit-rider demographics once the COVID-19 pandemic took most whiter and wealthier riders off of buses and (especially) …

Why Petroleum Did Not Save the Whales: Tech change without political, economic, and social change that supports

Richard York, October 25, 2017, https://doi.org/10.1177/2378023117739217 Ironically, even though fossil fuels provided substitutes for the main uses of whale oil, the rise of fossil fuel use in the nineteenth century served to increase the intensity of whaling. The connections between fossil fuels and whaling are an example of the unanticipated consequences that frequently come with technological change. I draw on …

A primary justification for fuel-dependent generation is its theoretical ability to generate regardless of the weather but over 40% of the coal, gas, & nuclear fleet are offline due to the cold in TX

Excerpt, RMI, 2/18/21… Wind turbine icing is the “least significant factor” in driving the outages, according to an ERCOT spokesperson. Additionally, it is notable that this is a relatively straightforward problem to solve. For example, in Canada “cold weather packages” allow wind turbines to operate in very low temperatures. Moreover, grid planners know and expect that wind power is often unavailable during system …