Environmentalists are hoping that a trial, due to begin October 29, will explain to the public how the government has known for decades about the dangers of fossil fuels but failed to act on this knowledge.
“Those of us who’ve been working on environmental justice and climate justice,” says Mustafa Ali, “understand we’re talking about housing, transportation, the environment, public health and jobs.”
Research shows that global warming will hit the American economy hard, particularly in the South.
Many scientists assert that this summer’s intense weather is being fueled by climate change. One of the most prominent is Penn State climatologist Michael Mann, who says the connection between the two is like “the link between smoking cigarettes and lung cancer.”
Co-published by International Business Times
Lowering taxes, shrinking the size of federal government and reducing the deficit were issues that played well in Mimi Walters’ conservative Orange County district. Then came the Parkland massacre.
Climate-change activists hoping to hear the governor propose a new climate initiative during his State of the State speech Thursday were disappointed.
The press tends to cover the immediate aftermath of natural disasters. Readers get heroic stories, viewers see great visuals, and if they are lucky, the victims get help while people are paying attention. Then comes the long road to recovery.
Some experts argue that private-sector efforts to stop climate change have penetrated too deeply into the business world, and claimed too much capital, to be thwarted by any single federal administration.
We are suffering a period of extreme weather patterns that a German insurance company says could only happen because of climate change. Last year was the hottest year ever – tracking on 14 months in a row of record-breaking temperatures.
For the past two decades, California has been at the cutting edge of social and economic change in America. Now, with Donald Trump about to enter the Oval Office, the Golden State is poised to take on a new role: leader of the anti-Trump resistance.
Over the next four years these California leaders will be in the forefront of opposing the Trump administration on immigration, the environment, labor rights and other issues.
More than any other place, California is well positioned to push back against the agenda of the incoming president. In this special series, Capital & Main examines why and how the Golden State will both lead the resistance to Donald Trump and continue to advance progressive ideas and policies.
We have a favorite place to camp at Joshua Tree where, this time, across the road from this spot, a guy drove a spiffy pickup truck and pulled a tiny trailer. Both he and his wife attend an evangelical mega-church near their Inland Empire home, He believed in human-caused climate change, she did not.
The elephant in the room at the presidential debates was climate change. According to a piece in Slate, this year the candidates spent a total of five minutes and 27 seconds on the subject. That’s better than 2012 when candidates didn’t mention it at all.
Bill Raden reports how Big Oil is trying to scuttle California’s program to reduce greenhouse gases.
Activists wanting to solve the crisis of human-caused climate change face a serious dilemma. The threat appears neither close enough to get our sustained attention, nor distant enough to postpone doing something about it now.
Most high school science teachers across the country now teach climate change, but about a third explain it away as a natural phenomenon. Another third tell their students that it comes from both natural and human causes. Meanwhile California almost reached its average reservoir and snowpack levels as measured at the end of March, and reports from around the world say that the oceans keep rising faster than expected and that annual temperatures continue go up. Last year finished as the hottest yet, following a decade of record-breaking annual tallies.
As if this weren’t happening, the fossil fuel folks keep pressing ahead. Our state’s three major privately-owned utility companies filed applications for a rehearing at the Public Utilities Commission, seeking a rollback of its recent rules encouraging rooftop solar panels. The big guys never give up.
So is there any good news this spring?
» Read more about: Spring Awakening: Uniting Against Climate Change »
Last month my wife Susan and I drove to Phoenix to visit family. We had never spent much time there, and my relatives wanted us to see some sites they thought would interest us. They took us to two places where an ancient people had lived for about a thousand years, reaching their height of power and size between about 950 and 1350 C.E.
This society built water canal systems that, anthropologists estimate, ran for a thousand miles. From what is now downtown Phoenix they took water from the Salt River and distributed it for farming across the local valley. Further south another group did the same on the Gila River. The main channels can be up to 30 feet across and 10 feet deep, all dug by hand, and so well engineered that water planners use some of the same routes today.
Economist: To sustain the human economy as a whole would require 1.5 Earths. » Read more about: Climate Change: Learning from the Past »
Love. Joy. Peace. That’s the message of the season. From carols to holiday cards to street signs, even shopping mall windows. These words hover next to the pervasive images encouraging us to buy, but somehow they persist despite the maze of mercantile messages, because they are the deep longings of human beings.
“No justice, no peace!” is what workers and activists often chant on picket lines. It turns out that without climate justice, we will also have no world peace. A recent Los Angeles Times story on El Niño and its potential “long-distance” or “teleconnected” effects quoted researchers arguing that “it doubles the risk of war in much of the Third World.”
Our military accounts for 80 percent of all the fossil fuels consumed by the U.S. government.
Peace activists have long identified war and the preparations for it as a major source of human-caused climate change.
The story of Mary and Joseph leaving their small town for Bethlehem has spawned dramatizations, poems, carols and a lot more since it was first told in the late First Century CE. The Latin American enactment, called Las Posadas, runs for nine nights, from December 16 through Christmas Eve. Each night families make a procession through their communities, walking from one house to another, begging for space for the holy couple and a birthing place for the baby Jesus. At every home they are turned away – until one family welcomes these poor wayfarers, usually with warm drinks and sweets.
The festival reenacts the ancient commandment from the Jewish tradition that we should welcome the stranger, the foreigner, the immigrant – because at one time we were all newcomers to this land.
Most Americans have forgotten this and have instead become very fearful after the November Paris attacks. Even while 9,000 refugees from Syria,
» Read more about: Immigration Crisis: The Strangers Are Us »
