Category Archives: Environment

Yet More Finance Profiteering: Green Bonds

Count on Wall Street to find a profit angle in actual or pending disaster. Green bonds are becoming a hot idea.

This Philadelphia Refinery Is the Country’s Worst Benzene Polluter. Trump Wants To Keep It Open

Trump-aided behind-the-scenes shenanigans may keep a horrifically toxic refinery in business.

Climate Change Needs To Be on the Balance Sheet

Serious people are finally calling for serious climate change accounting.

Obama Helped Make Cars More Efficient, but Now They Spew Black Carbon

How regulations to tame cars’ emissions created a new problem.

‘Uninsurable and Unhedgeable’: Central Banks Warn of Financial Crisis from Climate Change

The world’s most powerful financial institutions are sounding the alarm that “a new global financial crisis triggered by climate change would render central banks and financial supervisors powerless.”

Climate Change Helped Spawn East Africa’s Locust Crisis

East Africa had an unusually wet year in 2019 — warming waters in the Indian Ocean produced a high number of tropical cyclones, which doused the coast and created “exceptional” conditions for locust breeding.

How CEOs, Experts and Philosophers See the World’s Biggest Risks Differently

Trying to understand CEOs’ blinkered view of risks.

The Dead Zone Downstream: Gulf Edition

The cost of modern agriculture, as measured by a growing oxygen-free patch in the Gulf of Mexico.

Blue Acceleration: Our Dash for Ocean Resources Mirrors What We’ve Already Done to the Land

Will we drive the Blue Acceleration toward sustainable and equitable trajectories, or will we foul the ocean as we have fouled the land?

This Problem With Fracked Oil and Gas Wells Is Occurring ‘at an Alarming Rate’

Well casing failures are a growing problem for an industry chasing profitability by cutting corners for its shale gas fracking operations.

Dark Satanic Mills Are Not Just a Historical Artifact: MP Castigates Leicester Fast Fashion Factories

North West Leicesteshirer MP Andrew Bridgen demands answer on contemporary working conditions at local fast fashion factories.

Wolf Richter: The Great American Shale Oil & Gas Bust: Fracking Gushes Bankruptcies, Defaulted Debt, and Worthless Shares

A surge in frcking bankruptcies is fueled by collapsing prices for oil and natural gas; no end to the pain is in sight.

Could Sleeper Trains Replace International Air Travel?

After years of decline, night train services are again expanding, in part to cater to passengers who try to avoid air travel for environmental reasons.

Plastics Watch: China to Ban Single-Use Plastics, Malaysia Rejects Waste Shipments

China announces a ban on single-use plastics, while Malaysia refuses to serve as the world’s waste bin, and returns foreign waste shipments.

A European Green Deal Will Not Work Without Refocusing Productivity

A welfare-oriented European Green Deal needs to focus on resource and energy productivity, not raising labour productivity.