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) …
Saving the Climate in a Triple Crisis: A moon shot model for the transformation of capitalism
A helicopter surveyed the area with a searchlight during the Lake Fire in the San Bernardino National Forest near Big Bear Lake, California, in 2015 .Mariana Mazzucato March 15, 2021 Capitalism is facing three major crises. A pandemic-induced health crisis has rapidly ignited an economic crisis with yet unknown consequences for financial stability, and all of this is playing out …
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 …
Some Colorado Oil Workers Can See The Shift Away From Fossil Fuels Coming — And They Say They Need Help Navigating It
By Miguel Otárola, CPR, February 26, 2021 Trucks come and go from the EVRAZ Rocky Mountain Steel mill, a massive facility south of Pueblo. One of the main products workers make here are casings used for oil and gas wells in Texas and North Dakota. Production of the casings stopped last spring when the coronavirus pandemic and low oil prices halted …
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 …
50 years after Earth Day we’ve learned that big steps and rapid system change are essential
By Gustav Speth, Truthout, Feb 2021 – The New Environmentalism Must Demand Systemic Change BYJames Gustave Speth, Truthout ebruary 7, 2021 Fifty years ago, my young daughter and I were on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., for the first Earth Day. A group of us were then launching the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). Since then, the NRDC and other …
U.S. regulates vehicle greenhouse gas emissions on the basis of an automaker’s average fuel efficiency across its entire catalog
The U.S. regulates its greenhouse gas emissions on the basis of an automaker’s average fuel efficiency across its entire catalog, rather than setting hard caps on the allowable emissions for individual automobile models. In practice, that means that every electric vehicle that GM introduces will give it a little more room to release a high-polluting vehicle that could erase the …