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      ​A billboard in Austin, Texas, blaming Big Oil for extreme heat.

      Exxon Still Has Its Foot on the Accelerator of the Climate Emergency

      In a recent report, the company yet again doubled down on fossil fuels despite the nearly daily climate disasters, from record floods, fires, and heat bombs to record temperatures on land and at sea.

      Andy Rowell
      Aug 31, 2023

      If one oil company is synonymous with funding decades of climate denial, it is Exxon. For decades, the oil giant copied the deadly playbook of Big Tobacco of sowing doubt about the evidence and delaying action.

      The company funded a covert network of foot soldiers to deny evidence, delay action, and divert away from the industry. Between the late ’90s and 2005, the oil giant donated $16 million to numerous right-wing and libertarian think tanks to manufacture uncertainty about climate change.

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      Opinion
      Climate Emergency
      Volunteers and Vermont Army National Guardsmen unload water bottles.

      Instead of Moving to Escape Climate Chaos, Build Social Trust Where You Are

      As global heating shrinks the size of the board on which we play the game of life, we’re going to need to return to the basic human experience of relying on the people around us.

      Bill Mckibben
      Aug 05, 2023

      I’ve given a lot of talks about climate change over the years—that’s part of what organizers do. And I can predict with great confidence the questions that people will raise their hands to ask. “Isn’t the real problem overpopulation?” (Not really; most population growth is coming in places that use incredibly small amounts of energy.) Or “what about nuclear?” (keep the plants we’ve got open if we safely can; new ones are incredibly slow and expensive to build, though someday a generation of yet newer ones could conceivably change that; in the meantime rely on the nuclear reactor hanging a safe 93 million miles up in the sky).

      I can also predict the questions people will ask later, privately, as the crowd drifts out of the auditorium. One—“Is it OK for me to have a kid?”—is almost unbearably painful; no one should have to ask it. The other—“Where should I move?”—is a (little) less traumatizing. And I think it’s on a lot of minds, especially right now, as it becomes clear that many parts of our Earth won’t be habitable going forward. As I tried to explain in a recent book, global heating is systematically shrinking the size of the board on which humans can play the game of life.

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      Opinion
      Climate Emergency
      A boy and adult look through a chain-link fence at a flooded highway in Detroit.

      In Climate Changing Detroit, What Does Water Mean?

      Director dream hampton’s new film Freshwater, about flooding in the historically Black neighborhood of Belle Isle, offers room for reflection and melancholy in a summer of extremes.

      Bill Mckibben
      Jul 30, 2023

      My limbic system is down for repairs; week after week of record high temperatures around the globe, with fires blazing, reefs bleaching, ice sheets melting. It’s the biggest story on Earth, and I will go on working on it for the rest of my life, but today, for whatever reason, I found myself in need of something… not more cheerful but more meditative, something that engages a different part of my brain.

      So I found it useful to spend a day watching and rewatching a short new film by the director dream hampton (she lowercases her name, in part in tribute to the beloved essayist bell hooks) about her home city of Detroit. hampton is a big-time movie-maker; her harrowing account of an abusive R&B star, Surviving R. Kelley, has gotten all kinds of awards. But perhaps her limbic system needed a break too; in any event, this video, made for the Times Op-Docs series (in conjunction with the remarkable folks at the Hip Hop Caucus), is in a very different key. It’s about the way that as the Great Lakes have risen in recent years they’ve begun to flood the Belle Isle section of Detroit, which as she explains in a study guide accompanying the video is a park rich in memories for her and “historically a gathering place for Black Detroiters’ family reunions, celebrations, or just sunny afternoons.”

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      Opinion
      Climate Emergency
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