Portside

Effort meant to inform younger generations about energy and the environment sees sentences reworked and pie charts eliminated.

A combination of better jobs and pensions will remove one political obstacle to a green transition—and it’s the right thing to do.

"FOSSIL CAPITAL" The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming, Verso Books, 2016 By Andreas Malm. Reviewed by Martin Empson

Dozens of citizens were planning to protest the auction Tuesday morning in Salt Lake City. Instead, they will celebrate the Bureau’s decision to postpone the auction of 73,000 acres of publicly owned oil and gas in Utah — which harbor an estimated 1.6 – 6.6 million tons of potential greenhouse gas pollution. The planned protest had been led by elders calling on the BLM to act to prevent catastrophic climate change and to ensure a livable future for generations to come.

In its “Earth statement”, the group said that three-quarters of known fossil fuel reserves must be left in the ground if warming was not to breach a rise of 2C, the “safety limit.” Spelling out what a global deal at the UN climate summit in Paris should include, the group demanded governments adopt a goal of reducing economies’ carbon emissions to zero by mid-century, put a price on carbon and that the richest take the lead with the most aggressive cuts.

Two U.S. initiatives to provide Africans with electricity seem likely to lead to large, climate-polluting projects rather than the locally sourced renewable energy rural Africa needs.

Climate-change policy directly affects Koch Industries’s bottom line. Koch Industries, according to Environmental Protection Agency statistics cited in the study, is a major source of carbon-dioxide emissions, the kind of pollution that most scientists believe causes global warming.