I am asked in an e-mail: “I’m assuming that in 30 or 40 years, everyone will (pretty much) be using nuclear power for their energy needs. By last count, there were 440+ nuclear reactors in the worl…
Assessing Carbon Capture: Public Policy, Science, and Societal Need
From typhoons to wildfires, as the visible impacts of climate change mount, calls for mitigation through carbon drawdown are escalating. Environmentalists and many climatologists are urging steps to enhance biological methods of carbon drawdown and sequestration. Market actors seeing avenues for profit have launched ventures in mechanical–chemical carbon dioxide removal (CDR), seeking government support for their methods. Governments are responding. Given the strong, if often unremarked, momentum of demands for public subsidy of these commercial methods, on what cogent bases can elected lea...
States across Europe and East Asia are closing nuclear reactors and replacing much of their electricity-generating capacity with offshore wind energy. Socialists should embrace the growth of this industry — and use green reindustrialization to fight for well-paid, stable jobs.
The most popular poster for the Green New Deal reveals startling assumptions. Looking at it as a whole, ignoring the details for now, the poster exhibits a sense of movement. The train is the focal point and duplicates similar depiction of trains, for example, in vintage French posters. These huge machines, emblematic of the Modern More
Linus Blomqvist wrote a blog post responding to my article, arguing that focusing on aggregate material flows is “misleading”, and that in reality absolute decoupling “is still a very real possibility.” The stakes are high. After all, decoupling is the central objective of ecomodernism. No decoupling, no ecomodernism.
As Guy Routh explained forty years ago in his magisterial book, The Origin of Economic Ideas, economics has preposterous origins. Since the time of Adam Smith, the new academic discipline was linked through the emerging class of merchants and manufacturers to the rich and powerful in general, and fulfilled the ideological role of presenting the emerging capitalist system as the best of all possible worlds.
Stanford Study Says Renewable Power Eliminates Argument for Using Carbon Capture with Fossil Fuels
New research from Stanford University professor Mark Z. Jacobson questions the climate and health benefits of carbon capture technology against simply switching to renewable energy sources like wind and solar. Carbon capture technology is premised on two possible approaches to reducing climate
Ecomodernists claim material growth can continue indefinitely without environmental damage. Degrowth advocate Jason Hickel says their arguments ignore both…
Why De growth is Essential: A Rejection of Left Ecomodernists Phillips, Sharzer, Bastini, and Parenti.
The recently-emerged De growth movement advances the basic, fifty year old, ”limits to growth” case which has now accumulated a huge supporting literature.
What Would It Be Like to Live in an Era of Geoengineering?
Geoengineering is the bogeyman of climate policy, a word that calls to mind skies bleached sulphur white, dessicated crop fields, and dead zones expanding across the oceans. Humanity has a garbage track record when it comes to manipulating the environment so it’s not as if these fears are unfounded, but the reality is a little more complicated.
Christian Parenti As should be abundantly clear at this point, the Bhaskar Sunkara publishing empire has little to do with ecosocialism. It unfurled its banner in the Summer 2017 Jacobin issue that…
Humans are an environment-making species — and that’s okay. The real challenge of environmentalism and the Green New Deal is not to retreat and let the ecology be, but to change how we make environments.