Are We Stuck With ‘Blah, Blah, Blah, … Bang’? By ANDREW C. REVKIN I was struck by a comment that followed my latest piece on cutting disaster risks, reacting to this line: “Only direct experience seems to trigger change.” Yeah. It seems Homo S “Sapiens” at large needs to first get hit by the...
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Tags: Denialism, Human Nature
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The urgency felt by Morales and the more than 15,000 people from 150 nations attending the World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth (CMPCC) was evident from the first sentences uttered by the host and convener of this unprecedented gathering in Tiquipaya, a small town just north of Cochabamba,...
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Has our society become too complex to sustain?By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 19th April 2010Man proposes; nature disposes. We are seldom more vulnerable than when we feel insulated.The miracle of modern flight protected us from gravity, atmosphere, culture, geography. It made everywhere feel local, interchangeable. Nature interjects, and we encounter – tragically...
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Recently, Glen Sweetnam, director of the International, Economic and Greenhouse Gas division of the Energy Information Administration at the Department of Energy (DOE), announced that worldwide oil availability had reached a “plateau.” However, his statement was not made known through a major US mainstream media outlet. Instead, it was covered in France's Le Monde....
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A new popular sport in some media these days is “climate scientist bashing”. Instead of dealing soberly with the climate problem they prefer to attack climate scientists, i.e. the bearers of bad news. The German magazine DER SPIEGEL has played this game last week under the suggestive heading “Die Wolkenschieber” – which literally translated...
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Tags: denial
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An IEA whistleblower says that the organization is downplaying the peak-oil situation to avoid panic in the markets. The world is much closer to running out of oil than official estimates admit, according to a whistleblower at the International Energy Agency who claims it has been deliberately underplaying a looming shortage for fear of triggering panic...
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Tags: Peak-Oil
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Climate change is accelerating and surpassing even the worst-case scenarios predicted by the models. Meanwhile the world’s nations are bickering over details of inadequate action. Are we committing suicide on an unprecedented scale?
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Tags: Copenhagen, Global Warming, Suicide Note
Posted in Global Warming, Politics | Comments Off
Here’s a thought provoking analogy, comparing what’s happening with climate-change denial to what has happened with the cod fisheries in Newfoundland. The tragedy of climate commons
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Tags: denial
Posted in Global Warming, Politics, Sustainable Dev., The Denial Machine | Comments Off
From The New York Times By ANDREW C. REVKIN Published: April 23, 2009 For more than a decade the Global Climate Coalition, a group representing industries with profits tied to fossil fuels, led an aggressive lobbying and public relations campaign against the idea that emissions of heat-trapping gases could lead to global warming. “The...
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Earth Day: 10 Big, Really Hard Things We Can Do to Save the Planet
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