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    transition towns

    March to end fossil fuels

    Worried About the Climate Crisis? Just Start Doing Something

    No matter where you are on the political spectrum, there is a group for you.

    Sabine von Mering
    Feb 09, 2024

    The world has temporarily reached the 1.5°C of warming that scientists had long warned must not be exceeded. And more and more people are feeling the consequences directly—most recently in Chile, where over 120 people have been killed by wildfires that were partly fueled by climate change. Global heating also contributed to the atmospheric rivers drowning California in torrential rains, creating mudslides, and causing hundreds of thousands to lose power. Scientists now say that climate change might lead them to add a Category 6 to the hurricane scale. January 2024 was the ninth-straight-warmest month on record and yet another record-breaking month after 2023 was the hottest year on record.

    You would think that all this would finally make Americans want to prioritize climate protection. Instead many are lining up behind a man who does not accept the scientific consensus on climate change, who ridicules what he calls climate fanaticism, and promises to “drill, drill, drill” from his first day in office. And American banks are changing their mind and investing in fossil fuel infrastructure again. That should be considered criminal under these circumstances. No wonder the rest of the world is staring at us in disbelief.

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    Opinion
    climate emergency
    Stop Misdiagnosing Climate Change

    Stop Misdiagnosing Climate Change

    So what's the real source of our planetary self-destruction? It's growth-dependent capitalism.

    Diana Stuart
    Ryan Gunderson
    Oct 12, 2018

    The recent IPCC report has received widespread attention. The report states that rapid and bold actions are necessary to avoid the catastrophic impacts of climate change and that the goals of the Paris Accord will be insufficient. This has resulted in an outpouring of opinion pieces calling for individuals to take actions in their daily lives to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and to pressure elected officials to take significant steps to support renewable energy. This sense of urgency is critically needed, yet most of these calls for action are misguided due to a widespread misdiagnosis of the climate change problem.

    To address a problem, it is most effective to identify the root cause. One might argue that the root cause of climate change is fossil fuel combustion. However, this overlooks how our current economic system not only continues to protect and sustain the fossil fuel industry but also drives the continuous increases in production and consumption causing environmental degradation at large. What is this system? Growth-dependent capitalism. Here we focus on the impacts of that growth. The prioritization of economic growth is what makes highly effective actions, such as buying-out or nationalizing fossil fuels and keeping them in the ground, infeasible. A recently released UN document, related to the 2019 Global Sustainable Development Report, suggests that the root cause of climate change is the economic system, namely one that prioritizes profits at the expense of ecological and social well-being.

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    Opinion
    We Need Cities of Resistance: Climate Adaptation Is No Longer an Option

    We Need Cities of Resistance: Climate Adaptation Is No Longer an Option

    The old adage that a crisis is never a crisis until it is validated by disaster has become a reality for seventy percent of our cities already dealing with flooding, drought, fire and environmental decay

    Jeff Biggers
    Oct 12, 2018
    IOWA CITY--The arrival of Hurricane Michael on the heels of the landmark IPCC climate report is a reminder that climate "adaptation" is no longer a viable option.
     
    Adapting to a failed system in an age of climate change, as the devastation from Hurricane Michael attests, is failure, not adaptation.
     
    My own town in Iowa had to cancel celebrations this week for a recently completed $60 million flood mitigation project on our Iowa River, due to even more flooding. With the red lights of the University of Iowa's coal-fired power plant burning in the background, the irony of climate failure was not lost on anyone.

    Our nation spent more than $300 billion on recovery from climate disasters last year. The historic barrage of hurricanes in 2017--wiping out Puerto Rico's and the U.S. Virgin Islands' infrastructure, grinding the city of Houston to a stop, and placing Miami's downtown streets under water--served as a brutal and costly reminder that our major cities along the coasts have reached a reckoning with the rising tide.

    "We can no longer continue with the delusional planning that somehow doing 'less bad or harm' is sustainable; instead, we must actively break from our dependence on fossil fuels and rebuild our local economies in ways that restore our relationships with nature and regenerate the ecosystems we depend on."

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    Opinion

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