How we make progress now: Parts 1 and 2
As all us fans of sports cliches know, the best defense is a good offense. Time to start setting the fossil fuel industry back on its heels a bit!
Energy featured
Jean-Baptiste Fressoz: “Always Adding More: The Unpopular Reality about Energy Transitions”
Today, Nate is joined by energy and technology historian Jean-Baptiste Fressoz for a lesson on the importance of understanding the historical trajectory of energy use for realistically navigating the unprecedented challenges humanity faces today – including the dominant narrative of a modern-day “energy transition.”
How Inclusive Utility Investments bring the energy transition to rural residents
By expanding the prevalence of IUI programs, and making sure the specifics of these programs are tailored to the benefit of working people, it is possible to effectively tackle both the climate crisis and affordability crisis at once.
The View from Washington
Trump, as promised, signed dozens of executive orders on Day 1. Included in the batch was the order Unleashing American Energy (EO). By energy is meant coal, oil, and gas. It’s telling that when this administration and too many Republican members of Congress talk about an “all of the above” strategy, they somehow leave out renewables, including efficiency.
Artificial Intelligence and the Lost Ark
In this Frankly, Nate explores seven potential macro-risks associated with AI, from the amplification of wealth inequality to the (literal) existential threat of superintelligence. Through the lens of ‘obligatory technology’ and Jevons paradox, he examines how AI could turbocharge the economic superorganism – accelerating its impact on resource extraction, ecosystem degradation, and human meaning – all while fragmenting our shared reality and concentrating power in dangerous ways.
Only So Much Oil in the Ground… or Gas for that Matter
A critical component strategy for creating a viable future energy system and addressing climate change, must surely be energy demand reduction (minimisation), e.g. through relocalisation, retrofitting buildings, local food growing, and reducing waste, to curb the size of resource [very much plural] demands, get us below overshoot and avoid collapse (if we can).
Native Organizations Fill Gaps in Federal Support for Tribal Renewable Energy, Healing Native Communities
The adoption of renewable energy represents a glimmer of renewed hope for Tribes, illuminating a path forward despite the shadows cast by systematic subjugation.
Wishful thinking? Sweden building nuclear waste site to last 100,000 years
Can you think of anything built by humans that you would expect to last 100,000 years? I can’t.
Mobilise as if our lives depend on it
There is a battle for the role of the state, with democratic community movements worldwide — including citizens, students, the labour movement, grassroots organisations,, and a myriad of other diverse constituencies — demanding that the state act to overturn deregulation’s hegemony.
The Wrong Lesson From Trudeau’s Fall Is That Climate Action Is Unpopular
Canadians clearly want to turn the page on Trudeau’s image-infatuated tenure. However, it would be a grave mistake for the Liberal party to also assume they need to jettison climate policy under the mistaken assumption that being too progressive is what led to the party’s current decline.
The urgent necessity of asset stranding
As Malm and Carton explain, if firm policies were put in place to “leave fossil fuels in the ground”, stranding the assets of fossil fuel companies, there would be “layer upon layer” of value destruction.
University of Toronto students score a win for the climate — and campus protests more broadly
When the University of Toronto’s School of the Environment announced in October that it will no longer accept donations from the fossil fuel industry, the news sent waves through the growing movement to get coal, oil and gas companies off campuses. Among other things, that means banning fossil fuel corporations from financing academic research.