A review of “This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate,” with special attention to Klein’s “polluter pays”/Robin Hood funding mechanisms.
Read more...One of my hats is as a climate interpreter to the interested lay person. I have something of a science background and can read the papers “in the original.” Another hat is as an occasional interviewer for Virtually Speaking. This month the two hats merged on the same head, and I got to interview the “Hockey Stick graph” climate scientist, Dr. Michael Mann.
For this interview I focused on the basics:
▪ Can humans burn more carbon, create more emissions, and still stay below the IPCC’s “safe” +2°C warming target?
▪ Is the IPCC’s +2°C warming target truly “safe” at all?
▪ We’re already experiencing warming of about +1°C above the pre-industrial level. Even if we stop now, how much more is “in the pipeline,” guaranteed and unavoidable?
▪ How do we defeat the Big Money ogre that stands in our way?
And my personal favorite:
▪ Will the answer to global warming come from the “free market”?
Read more...Yves here. Readers regularly debate issues of growth, groaf, and sustainability. This post makes an urgent case that we are farther along toward collapse, based on our consumption of biological resources, than most official sources acknowledge.
Read more...I know, I know. Criticizing Bill McKibben is like kicking a puppy.
Read more...Yves here. This post by Steven Horn about that shows the typical terms of an oil and gas rights lease for American Energy Partners buries the lead, in that Steve needs to give the context of how the lease came to be public before he turns to explaining how the lease rips off the party who signs it. Among other things, it requires the homeowner to have any mortgage made subordinate to the royalty agreement, something no lender will agree to. If the homeowner can’t get the subordination (a given), no royalties will be paid! As you’ll see, there are other “heads I win, tails you lose” terms in these agreement.
Read more...Yves here. Be warned, this isn’t standard Naked Capitalism fare. It’s a bit of “road trip meets oil boom subculture.” But while there has been a lot of reporting on what is happening in communities where fracking is underway, there has been comparatively little on-the-ground-coverage of what is arguably the bigger story, the development of the Bakken oil field.
Read more...If you acknowledge the economic and resource implications of demography, you need to favor no or few child policies. But that remains a third rail in politics and economics.
Read more...The substitution from child quantity to quality has been credited for mankind’s escape from the Malthusian trap and the advent of sustained economic growth. This column argues that biocultural preferences for quality faced positive selection pressure in the pre-growth era, presenting evidence from the founding population of Quebec. Individuals with moderate levels of fecundity had fewer children than those with high fecundity, but produced more descendants in the long run because their children enjoyed higher reproductive success.
Read more...Spoiler: No Money cannot save the climate. Not without checks and balances to keep the power-hungry from dominating.
Read more...Yves here. It should come as no surprise that Obama’s rhetoric on climate change is sorely out of whack with his policies. Indeed, as Michael Klare reports, there’s been enough of a economic rebound in the US to lead to more driving, and hence more oil usage. And rather than regard that as a problem, the Administration has shifted from talking up clean energy to pushing more domestic oil production.
Read more...If there is not major coastal restoration soon, all of the city’s natural protection will be gone. Meanwhile, BP is racking up wins in court.
Read more...Yves here. The success of seed companies in extracting rents from farmers, particularly in countries where subsistence farming is widespread, is yet another example of how corporations like Monsanto abuse intellectual property laws and monopoly/oligopoly power. For the most part, governments have by their inaction backed this scheme. And that’s before you get to the fact that GMO crops, as a former NIH biomedical researcher stressed to me, is a massive experiment being conducted on the public at large without consent or controls.
Don Quijones reports on a ruling in Mexico that has, at least for the moment, thrown a spanner in the seed companies’ plans by barring field trials of GMO crops due to environmental risks.
Read more...Yves here. In this post, Tverberg contends that renewable energy sources are not the remedy for global warming that its proponents hope they will be. Too often, “clean” energy sources have not been properly costed out in resource, and sometimes even in carbon terms.
Read more...Zephyr Teachout, with her running mate Tim Wu, are running against Democratic party fixture, the State governor Andrew Cuomo, and his lieutenant governor nominee Kathy Hochul.
Read more...With the ink still drying on Mexico’s historic energy reform, global oil and gas majors are salivating at the prospect of gaining access to one of the world’s largest and until recently most nationalized energy markets. One of those companies is the Spanish electricity giant Iberdrola, which expects to massively expand its operations in Mexico through increased investments of close to €1 billion.
Now, I know what you’re thinking: €1 billion is chicken feed in this age of inflated corporate balance sheets. Indeed, for some corporations such a sum is probably hardly worth getting out of bed for these days. However, in Mexico it can go a very long way, much further than it can in Europe or the US – especially when you have paid moles lobbying for your every interest at the highest level of government.
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