Tag: Climate Change

Wild by Design

June 22, 2023 / CounterPoint

Repairing the damage humans have done to the planet is a colossal challenge. One way we can restore some of its natural ecosystems is through rewilding: making more room for natural processes and allowing other species the freedom to shape their environments, with human management kept to a minimum.

Fundamentally, rewilders emphasize hands-off practices to restore ecosystem functions. “Taking our hands off the steering wheel and allowing nature the time and space to express itself is one of the fundamentals of rewilding,” write Tree and Burrell. But in reality, this often means intervening intensively in the short term—say, by culling deer that eat young trees or reintroducing wolves—so that natural processes like forest regrowth can play out.

Not since the eco-utopian communes of the 1960s and ’70s has there been such an appetite for practical guides to engineering our surroundings to meet the needs of nature. A growing number of books propose practical projects to repair the natural environment, with the aim of leading us out of ecological anxiety toward hope for a wilder world. Matthew Ponsford takes a look at three new titles, and what those of us without hectares of land to our names can do to help.

What “rewilding” means-and what’s missing from this new movement

Canada’s Political Elites Are Climate Criminals in the Pocket of Big Oil

June 19, 2023 / CounterPoint

This drive to expand oil and gas production is deeply rooted and long-standing. In 2008, activity in the oil sands of northern Alberta was described as “the world’s greatest modern oil rush,” and the frenzied drive to extract “dirty oil” evoked images of a “new Kuwait.” At that time, it was suggested in the Guardian that by “2050 Canada could be the second largest oil producer in the world, shifting the global energy security equation but exacerbating global climate change in a way that has scarcely been considered.”

The predictable antics of right-wing politicians, as reprehensible as they are, shouldn’t divert our attention from the fact that faulty climate stewardship isn’t confined to conservatives [Ed: nor are they confined to Canada.]

The idea that Canada could be a top-tier global energy producer has become accepted across the mainstream political spectrum. Alongside that acceptance, concerns for ecological consequences have been largely disregarded, often limited to mere lip service. On the Right, federal Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre, as he campaigned for the leadership of his party, declared, “We’re going to clear the way for pipelines. I am going to support pipelines south, north, east, and west. We will build Canadian pipelines.”

Canada’s Political Elites Are Climate Criminals in the Pocket of Big Oil

Climate: American per capita emissions are more than twice those of Europeans

June 6, 2023 / CounterPoint

Reducing consumption today reduces the number of people elsewhere who will suffer the consequences tomorrow and can prevent much of the instability that would otherwise result.

Throughout the world, the researchers estimate, the average person who is going to be exposed to unprecedented heat comes from a place that emitted roughly half the per capita emissions as those in wealthy countries. American per capita emissions are more than twice those of Europeans, who still live a prosperous and modern existence, the authors point out, so there is ample room for comfortable change short of substantial sacrifice. “The idea that you need the level of wasteful consumption … that happens on average in the U.S. to be part of a happy, flourishing, rich, democratic society is obviously nonsense,” Lenton said.

“There are clear, profound ethical consequences in the numbers,” Timothy Lenton, one of the study’s lead authors and the director of the Global Systems Institute at the University of Exeter in the U.K., said in an interview. “If we can’t level with that injustice and be honest about it, then we’ll never progress the international action on this issue.”

Each American today emits nearly enough emissions over their lifetime to push one Indian or Nigerian of the future outside of their climate niche, the study found, showing exactly how much harm Americans’ individual actions can cause (1.2 Americans to 1 future person, to be exact). The lifestyle and policy implications are obvious: Reducing consumption today reduces the number of people elsewhere who will suffer the consequences tomorrow and can prevent much of the instability that would otherwise result. “I can’t — as a citizen of a planet with this level of risk opening up — not also have some kind of human and moral response to the figures,” Lenton said. We’ve all got to deal with that, he added, “in our own way.”

Climate Crisis Is on Track to Push One-Third of Humanity Out of Its Most Livable Environment

The Rise of the Greedconomy

April 4, 2023 / CounterPoint

You’ve felt the pain. The groan-inducing way your wallet bursts open whenever you have to…pay for stuff these days. Basics. How fast is the price of food…still…rising? Upwards of 10%, by some estimates. The elemental necessities are skyrocketing upwards. That’s not just because of the war in Ukraine, it’s not because of Covid, which is no longer, rightly or wrongly, a public health emergency — it’s because, at this point, of climate change. We’ll come back to that. First, the point.

One of the great, dismal trends of this age is going to be profiteering — on a historic, jaw-dropping scale.

There are already three economic effects of climate change, which we’re ignoring, resolutely, probably because, well, everything else is going wrong, and it’s easier to be hypnotized by the spectacle of Trump doing a perp walk, or fascists banning books at schools, and so forth. Those three effects, though, go like this. Prices rise. Corporations profiteer. And our economies go haywire.

Real incomes are plummeting. That’s not a coincidence, that’s a relationship…

The Rise of the Greedconomy

Want to Know Why Your Wallet’s Hurting? Profiteering – On a Dying Planet. Take a hard look at the chart above. If it doesn’t take your breath away…it should. My job, unfortunately, is to warn. To break bad news. More of the time than I’d like, in this dystopian age.