A first-of-its-kind municipal climate charter in Texas could throw a wrench in US fossil fuel extraction. Residents of a major Texas city just west of the Permian Basin, the largest oil field in the US, will have the chance to vote on the package this spring. If the proposal passes, the city of El Paso would adopt a comprehensive… Read More Texas youth organizers take aim at the biggest oil field in the US
Adam Tooze As far as we are currently able to judge, our best chance to halt the further escalation of the climate crisis through decarbonization of the economy depends on electricity and electrification. Given the current horizon of technological expectations, electric power and electric technology offer us the best chance of reconciling the insatiable desire… Read More Repowering the world: the challenge of electrification
Madeleine de Trenqualye Naomi Klein published her first book on the climate crisis, This Changes Everything, almost a decade ago. She was one of the organisers and authors of Canada’s Leap manifesto, a blueprint for a rapid and justice-based transition off fossil fuels. In 2021, she joined the University of British Columbia as professor of… Read More ‘It’s inequality that kills’: Naomi Klein on the future of climate justice
Manuel Paez Terán was protesting a planned Atlanta police training center when officers repeatedly shot and killed him. The activist, who went by the name Tortuguita, was one of dozens trying to protect the South River Forest from a $90m, 85-acre police and fire department training center planned for the site. The project is known… Read More ‘Sadness in the whole forest’: family of Cop City activist killed by US police seeks answers
Paul Nowak, the general secretary of the TUC, said hard-pressed families were being treated like “cash machines” and would “rightly feel furious”. Calling for higher windfall taxes on oil and gas companies, he added: “As millions struggle to heat their homes and put food on the table, BP are laughing all the way to the… Read More British Petroleum scales back climate goals as profits more than double to £23bn
Rachel Ramirez, CNN Glaciers around the world are melting at an alarming rate, and are leaving massive pools of water in their wake. The meltwater fills the depression left behind by the glacier, forming what’s known as a glacial lake. As temperatures get warmer and more pieces of the glacier melt away, the lake rises — and living downstream… Read More An ‘inland tsunami’: 15 million people are at risk from catastrophic glacial lake outbursts
Matthew T. Huber, Climate Change as Class War: Building Socialism on a Warming Planet (2022) Reviewed by Casey Williams The US Congress passed its largest ever investment in clean energy in August – the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) – and yet it remains impossible to shake the feeling that, as Matthew T. Huber puts it, ‘the climate… Read More Climate Change as Class War
German police warned they would not allow their officers to be targeted with violence amid growing tensions with climate protesters in the condemned village of Lützerath on Monday. The village is set to be swallowed up by the local coal mine, run by Germany’s energy giant RWE. But organizations such as the Last Generation and Fridays for Future… Read More Germany: Police, coal protesters face off in Lützerath
Polly Toynbee NB: The planet needs no saving, Ms Polly, it’s not in danger. Its the environment that we need to save, from ourselves. DS Just Stop Oil protesters this week are climbing gantries on the M25, blocking the Dartford tunnel, causing long delays and getting arrested in droves. Meanwhile the public order bill that would crack down… Read More To those who sneer at activists blocking roads: what are you doing to save the planet?
JUAN COLE Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Oxfam has a new study, Carbon Billionaires: The investment emissions of the world’s richest people. Zeroing on 150 billionaires in the sample, a tiny proportion of the top one percent numerically but a significant proportion of the latter’s wealth holdings, the study found that together they had a stake… Read More One Billionaire emits a Million times more CO2 than an Average Person. Protesters block Private Planes at Amsterdam
After the truth-shower 