How best to reduce greenhouse gas emissions: stop burning coal, eat less meat or block out the sun? The first and second look preferable to the third to me. How many reports do we need? Every organisation with an interest in climate change seems to produce at least one report a year that analyses countries’ Continue reading »
Enviroment
All countries are failing to look after their environments and their people. Long haul flights will continue to generate most CO2. The world’s youth are not happy. Biophysical boundaries and social thresholds This piece requires familiarity with two concepts: planetary boundaries and doughnut economics. The first posits that there are nine environmental factors that must Continue reading »
Michael Keating’s response to the P&I article series on growth – GDP and population – is very welcome as it provides a condensed summary of what has befuddled Australian political economy in recent decades. Problem one is his seeming complete unfamiliarity with post-growth scholarship: the problems it identifies, the causes of the problems, and the Continue reading »
Australia’s oceans, Greenland’s Ice Sheet and Antarctica’s sea ice are all feeling the heat. One million species are on the edge of extinction. No wonder life scientists are taking to the streets. Australia is in hot water Although the global warming that has occurred over the oceans is lower than the warming over land, about Continue reading »
Recently, I had a catch-up conversation on climate change and November’s UN climate change conference (COP27) in Sharm el-Sheikh with one of Hong Kong’s most conscientious students of the subject. As we began to wind up, I asked what we should be taking away from the UN Biodiversity Conference in Montreal – confusingly called COP15 – Continue reading »
… as Louis Armstrong famously croaked. Well, perhaps: The temperature’s going up. The rich are getting richer. Wetlands are disappearing. Gas is officially green. 2022 sixth hottest on record It’s hard not to keep telling the same old stories but keeping an eye on the global temperature is rather like keeping an eye on your Continue reading »
Tell it like it is, António: ‘climate disaster, death sentence, insanity, inconsistent with human survival’. Thank goodness for chocolate and birds. Was any progress made at the last COP meeting in Egypt? Were there game-changing, climate-action breakthroughs or was it simply more talk culminating in yet another failure (Greta Thunberg’s ‘Blah, blah, blah’)? Tom Athanasiou, Continue reading »
One can only hope that the day is not too far away when “I was only doing my job” will be no more a defence against climate crimes than it is against war crimes. Climate change has come to the Australian Alps, where the snow is failing and the snow gums are dying. But the Continue reading »
In recent months governments around the world, including ours, have been striving to reach agreement on “protecting nature”. The UN summit held in Montreal aimed at reaching a global deal to secure the protection of 30 per cent of the planet by 2030. This would involve investment in ways to achieve conservation of 30 per Continue reading »