Justice and Honesty in New Orleans

New Orleans still has more to teach us, and this little piece by Melissa Harris Lacewell, author of Barbershops, Bibles, and BET: Everyday Talk and Black Political Thought is a good place to look for another lesson. Faced with a haphazard (if not willfully incompetent) reconstruction that’s leaving the city’s poor black community in even more precarious straits than it suffered before the storm, Lacewell calls for a “restoration” that really is designed to make the victims whole.

There will be more hurricanes, more relocations, more — let’s face it — climate refugees. It’s time, as the “adaptation” debate heats up, to think more viscerally. And a bit of effort spent mining these same veins is just what’s needed.

EcoEquity Blogs the Montreal Conference

We, for our part, took the occasion of COPMOP1 to experiment with a blog. It was fun, intermittently illuminating, and occasionally thereapeutic. Our big success was that, in it, we finally succeeded in a long-time effort to engage the anti emissions trading folks in a public debate. To pick up that debate from the beginning, see Cloud Cukcoo Land. To drop in at a more orderly restart, see Cutting Through the Smoke on Trading. And, hey, feel free to contribute. This is definately a work in progress.

Where We Stand: Honesty about Dangerous Climate Change, and about Preventing it

Excuse the didactic tone we’re taking here…

We stand, first, with the emerging scientific consensus, which tells us we have very little time to act if we honestly expect to avoid a global (as opposed to a “merely local”) climate catastrophe. Further, we insist, contrary to the pretended realism of those who seek to be “reasonable,” on a rather direct approach. We do not, for example, imagine that carbon concentrations that would quite probably yield 3C or 4C of warming can reasonably be considered “safe.” (See this 2004 essay for technical details). Instead, we prefer to stay in the reality-based world of those (the E.U., the Climate Action Network) who draw the line at 2C maximum (which is itself not by any means safe) and who admit that avoiding a global climate catastrophe is going to be difficult indeed. Continue reading “Where We Stand: Honesty about Dangerous Climate Change, and about Preventing it”

News Flash: Poor More Likely to Die from Climate Impacts

Careful new calculations indicate that global warming contributes to 150,000 deaths and five million illnesses every year, and that this rate could double by 2030. Why Because we’ll see increased infectious disease outbreaks, respiratory illnesses, flooding, and other calamities. And here’s the real news, straight from the Washington Post: “Most Victims are Poor.” Even more shocking,” “Those most vulnerable to climate change are not the ones responsible for causing it.”

Finally, A Good Interview with EcoEquity

Hurricanes Katrina and Rita have done what environmental activists couldn’t — they’ve put global warming on the mainstream agenda. Now the question is what can be done about it Dr. Kevin Trenberth (National Center for Atmospheric Research) lays out the problem, while EcoEquity’s Tom Athanasiou links climate change to global justice. And it’s a podcast folks — you can listen instead of read!

A Glass Half Full? The Kyoto Protocol, and Beyond

The first thing to say about Kyoto’s entry into force is that it is a significant victory, won particularly by the Europeans, over social and economic complacency, cash-amplified, flat-earth pseudo-science, the carbon cartel, and, of course, the Bush Administration. The second is that, if it’s not soon followed by other victories, deeper and even more challenging ones, the Earth’s climate will soon – think 2050 or even sooner – be transformed into one that is far more inhospitable, and even hostile, than even most environmentalists imagine. Continue reading “A Glass Half Full? The Kyoto Protocol, and Beyond”

The Great Game

The Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research is Germany was already known for original thinking before it released Keep Cool: Gambling with the Climate, a board game that may, only a few decades hence, seem less comic than prescient. In the Risk-like world of Keep Cool, it’s even possible for, say, the developing countries to drive the climate over the edge, hoping all the while for the rich world to pay enough to make that destruction unnecessary. Sounds like fun, doesn’t it