Experimenting with ways to live a low impact life in a tiny house in the woods. Graphic and web design at Beardy Guy Creative . I often write about the Climate Emergency, Apple and the iPad. Living on the traditional territory of: O-ga-xpa Ma-zhoⁿ (O-ga-xpa) (Quapaw), Očhéthi Šakówiŋ, Kaskaskia, Kiikaapoi (Kickapoo)
Asia is experiencing weeks of “endless record heat”, with sweltering temperatures causing school closures and surges in energy use.
Record April temperatures have been recorded at monitoring stations across Thailand, Myanmar, Laos and Vietnam, as well as in China and South Asia.
4 weather stations in Myanmar matched record monthly temperatures, with Theinzayet reaching the highest, at 43C (109.4F). Bago, north-east of Yangon, reached 42.2C, matching the record previously set in May 2020 and April 2019.
In 2021, net electricity consumption worldwide amounted to over 25,000 terawatt-hours, an increase of more than 30 percent in comparison to a decade earlier. When compared to 1980, global electricity consumption more than tripled. On the generation side, the world is still strongly dependent on fossil fuels. Despite the world's renewable energy capacity quintupling in the last decade, coal and gas combined still accounted for almost 60 percent of global electricity generation in 2021.
I'm thinking about per capita electricity consumption this morning. According to Statista, the US is 12,314 kWh. A nice chart at the link below. I've not compared to other sources. But
TO CALL WHAT’S happening in the oceans right now an anomaly is a bit of an understatement. Since March, average sea surface temperatures have been climbing to record highs.
Since this record-keeping began in the early 1980s—the other squiggly lines are previous years—the global average for the world’s ocean surfaces has oscillated seasonally between 19.7 and 21 degrees Celsius (67.5 and 69.8 Fahrenheit). Toward the end of March, the average shot above the 21-degree mark and stayed there for a month. (The most recent reading, for April 26, was just a hair under 21 degrees.) This temperature spike is not just unprecedented, but extreme
Last year, the United States incurred over $2bn in costs due to 20 climate-related extreme weather events, from Hurricane Ian to heatwaves and drought. Lumber, cotton, tomatoes, wheat and energy – and the products they generate, from denim jeans to your Italian takeout dinner – were all affected by these events and are now more expensive than this time last year. Climate-driven extreme weather and disasters are now more frequently responsible for production shortages, supply chain disruptions...
Madeleine Finlay hears from correspondent Sandra Laville about how plastics are made, the environmental and health impacts of the process and what needs to be done to get a handle on plastic pollution
It’s possible to stop using plastic, but it does require effort and limits choices. I have cut back plastic intake by 95% over the past couple of years. Anyone can make the same choice. If we insist on continuing purchasing products that are packaged in plastic we are a part of the problem.
A brief summary of recent actions and future plans of Extinction Rebellion and other climate activists in the UK. I especially like call for citizens assemblies as a strategy for building longer term community, direct democracy into the movement.
The 2000-watt society is an environmental vision, first introduced in 1998 by the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zürich (ETH Zurich), which pictures the average First World citizen reducing their overall average primary energy usage rate to no more than 2,000 watts (i.e. 2 kWh per hour or 48 kWh per day) by the year 20502050, without lowering their standard of living.
The concept addresses not only personal or household energy use, but the total for the whole society, including embodied energy, divided by the population.
Two thousand watts is approximately the current world average rate of total primary energy use. This compared, in 2008, to averages of around 6,000 watts in western Europe, 12,000 watts in the United States, 1,500 watts in China, 1,000 watts in India, 500 watts in South Africa and only 300 watts in Bangladesh. Switzerland itself, then using an average of around 5,000 watts, was last a 2000-watt society in the 1960s.
Cofounder of Greenpeace and writer of the Deep Green column Rex Weyler helps us transcend the idea that we can fix the environment – or anything else – so we can finally learn to participate as members of a living world.
An excellent discussion between Rex Weyler and Douglass Rushkoff on the current episode of the Team Human Podcast.
With all the rain we've had recently the creek is flowing really well. My favorite place to stop and be still. These are the best moments in my simple, slow life. Learning to be content in a smaller radius and with as little external fossil fuel input as possible.
The current rate of extinctions compared to the geological norm is now several thousandfold faster, making this the sixth great mass extinction event in Earth’s history, and thus the start of the Anthropocene in its clearest demarcation, which is to say, we are in a biosphere catastrophe that will be obvious in the fossil record for as long as the Earth lasts.
It’s taken me far too long but I’m finally reading The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson. In the paragraph before the quote above, he provides a list of recently extinct species, from that list: Saudi gazelle
An excellent video of Roger Hallam of Extinction Rebellion. Stark, difficult, plain, honest. The response of the crowd seems to be somewhere between terrified and disbelief.
Climate change is going to cause a slow grind, much like an ever increasing tax, where it costs agriculture more to output the same amount. It’s easy for humans to ignore the changes within the habitats of other species. However, in our own habitat, the first area we will see indicators in is agricultural products. Which we are beginning to experience now.
Where damaging weather patterns don’t interrupt the crop cycle, the supply chain will.
As we inch closer and closer to the precipice of a climate apocalypse, a new film, “How to Blow Up a Pipeline,” lands with a rageful conviction about the necessary obliteration, by any means, of the greedy systems that may soon kill us all.
When Xochitl aptly explains that “this is an act of self-defense,” what she is so vehemently protecting is the chance at a collective future. Their fight then is just as much our fight.
In 2021, a Texas intelligence command center disseminated a bulletin warning its law enforcement partners about activists interested in sabotaging fossil fuel infrastructure. The report detailed no specific threat, but instead linked to an interview with Andreas Malm, a Swedish professor of human ecology, on a New Yorker podcast in which he advocated for the destroying or “neutralizing” new fossil fuel projects like pipelines using nonviolent methods.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) synthesis report recently landed with an authoritative thump, giving voice to hundreds of scientists endeavouring to understand the unfolding calamity of global heating. What’s changed since the last one in 2014? Well, we’ve dumped an additional third of a trillion tonnes of CO₂ into the atmosphere, primarily from burning fossil fuels. While world leaders promised to cut global emissions, they have presided over a 5% rise.
There are radical, yet pragmatic, solutions to our crises. But fear of what will happen if we don’t act is imprisoning people in a mindset that makes alternatives seem unthinkable. I am frequently told my solutions are unrealistic and will never happen; that people would rather fight each other in wars than adapt to share food and land, for instance. We make our own future, even if it’s hard to see the process. So let me try to make the case for hope.
The US already has all the technology needed to rapidly bring down carbon emissions. The trouble is finding enough people to install it all.
The Inflation Reduction Act, passed last summer, allocates $370 billion toward energy security and climate action….
The solar industry could grow from 230,000 to 400,000 employees this decade and will have to exceed 900,000 by 2035 to reach the Biden administration’s goal of 100 percent clean electricity…
Drastically reduce emissions first, or carbon dioxide removal will be next to useless.
Carbon dioxide removal (CDR) is what puts the ‘net’ into ‘net zero emissions’. All pathways to limit global warming to 1.5–2 °C above pre-industrial levels that have been assessed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change require rapid decarbonization to start now. But they also require the removal of CO2 from the atmosphere because we won’t be able to eliminate carbon emissions entirely…
The temperature of the world’s ocean surface has hit an all-time high since satellite records began, leading to marine heatwaves around the globe.
“The current trajectory looks like it’s headed off the charts, smashing previous records,” said Prof Matthew England, a climate scientist at the University of New South Wales.
Three years of La Niña conditions across the vast tropical Pacific have helped suppress temperatures and dampened the effect of rising greenhouse gas emissions.
