Daniel Rourke /stream

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Newly-released oil industry documents push back the start date of the world’s most successful disinformation campaign to the 1960s, if not earlier.

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Star Trek was one way of dealing with the social anxieties of the 1960s. Since sci-fi mirrors the present, ecological collapse requires a new dystopian fiction Build an imaginary world in…

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In much of your writing, you talk about the relationship between mass migration and climate change. How can climate change be more consciously linked to existing opposition to borders and everyday…

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In the winter of 2013, I drove up California’s Central Valley to Stockton, to interview Cambodian parents who’d lost children in one of the nation’s many mass school shootings.

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Would you advise someone to flap towels in a burning house? To bring a flyswatter to a gunfight? Yet the counsel we hear on climate change could scarcely be more out…

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No one knows how to talk about climate change right now. I don’t have an idea about where to begin, and I write about it professionally. On the one hand, the…

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We continue to plan for the future as if climate scientists don’t exist. The greatest shame is the absence of a sense of tragedy We continue to plan for the future…

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The future we’ve been warned about is beginning to saturate the present. We tend to imagine climate change as a destroyer. But it also traffics in disruption, disarray: increasingly frequent and…

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Steve Huffman, the thirty-three-year-old co-founder and C.E.O. of Reddit, which is valued at six hundred million dollars, was nearsighted until November, 2015, when he arranged to have laser eye surgery.

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Among the many stories that can be told about the origins of the environmental movement in the West, perhaps the most common is that it began with the emergence of Romanticism…

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Just after World War II, when the atomic bombs fell and our thirst for coal and oil became a full-blown addiction, Earth entered the Anthropocene, a new geologic time when humanity’s…

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Russia is fighting a mysterious anthrax outbreak in a remote corner of Siberia. Dozens of people have been hospitalized; one child has died. The government airlifted some families out because more…

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Bringing children into a disintegrating environment used to be a theoretical fear. Now it’s a very real one The decision whether or not to have a child is one of the…

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“Human activity is leaving a pervasive and persistent signature on Earth.” So begins one of the more depressing scientific papers I’ve ever read.

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Later this year, a nuclear power reactor will open in the US for the first time in two decades. But this reactor, called Watts Bar Unit 2—one of two near Spring…

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The librarian was nondescript in the way that everyone standing behind a counter is, probably in her 30s, with straight, fox-colored hair.

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The race for renewable energy has passed a turning point. The world is now adding more capacity for renewable power each year than coal, natural gas, and oil combined. And there's…

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There is now compelling evidence to show that humanity’s impact on the Earth’s atmosphere, oceans and wildlife has pushed the world into a new geological epoch, according to a group of…

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I believe that the present century is the most precarious in which humanity has ever lived. On the one hand, certain emerging technologies are placing an ever-greater amount of power in…

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It is possible that the climate wars have already started. The ‘aridity line’ is usually considered to be 200mm of annual rainfall. Below that, you have desert.

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Deep in the arctic, inside over 400 feet of rock, a huge cache of seeds is stored in the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, in case of some global emergency. Today, the…

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As the 19th century entered its final decade, the War of Currents was nearing its peak. On one side of this war was Thomas Edison, who had invested heavily in direct-current…

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A few years ago in a lab in Panama, Klaus Winter tried to conjure the future. A plant physiologist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, he planted seedlings of 10 tropical…

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In my past postings, I’ve pointed out how the Anthropocene thesis can be roundly criticized for its assorted failings.

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Newly-released oil industry documents push back the start date of the world’s most successful disinformation campaign to the 1960s, if not earlier.

Bookmark

Star Trek was one way of dealing with the social anxieties of the 1960s. Since sci-fi mirrors the present, ecological collapse requires a new dystopian fiction Build an imaginary world in…

Bookmark

The future as shown to us by science fictions is almost always shiny. Whether in aspirational daydreams or depictions of dystopia, the vision continues to be one of gleaming metal, stark…

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In the winter of 2013, I drove up California’s Central Valley to Stockton, to interview Cambodian parents who’d lost children in one of the nation’s many mass school shootings.

Bookmark

No one knows how to talk about climate change right now. I don’t have an idea about where to begin, and I write about it professionally. On the one hand, the…

Bookmark

IF YOU’RE a typical westerner, you ate nearly 100 kilograms of meat last year. This was almost certainly the costliest part of your diet, especially in environmental terms. The clamour for…

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The future we’ve been warned about is beginning to saturate the present. We tend to imagine climate change as a destroyer. But it also traffics in disruption, disarray: increasingly frequent and…

Bookmark

Steve Huffman, the thirty-three-year-old co-founder and C.E.O. of Reddit, which is valued at six hundred million dollars, was nearsighted until November, 2015, when he arranged to have laser eye surgery.

Bookmark

Among the many stories that can be told about the origins of the environmental movement in the West, perhaps the most common is that it began with the emergence of Romanticism…

Bookmark

Just after World War II, when the atomic bombs fell and our thirst for coal and oil became a full-blown addiction, Earth entered the Anthropocene, a new geologic time when humanity’s…

Bookmark

Barring some incredible new carbon capture technology, the window for limiting global warming to less than 1.5 degrees Celsius appears to have closed.

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Bringing children into a disintegrating environment used to be a theoretical fear. Now it’s a very real one The decision whether or not to have a child is one of the…

Bookmark

Later this year, a nuclear power reactor will open in the US for the first time in two decades. But this reactor, called Watts Bar Unit 2—one of two near Spring…

Bookmark

Social unrest and famine, superstorms and droughts. Places, species and human beings – none will be spared. Welcome to Occupy Earth

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The race for renewable energy has passed a turning point. The world is now adding more capacity for renewable power each year than coal, natural gas, and oil combined. And there's…

Bookmark

There is now compelling evidence to show that humanity’s impact on the Earth’s atmosphere, oceans and wildlife has pushed the world into a new geological epoch, according to a group of…

Bookmark

I believe that the present century is the most precarious in which humanity has ever lived. On the one hand, certain emerging technologies are placing an ever-greater amount of power in…

Bookmark

It is possible that the climate wars have already started. The ‘aridity line’ is usually considered to be 200mm of annual rainfall. Below that, you have desert.

Bookmark

The world’s oil resources are unlikely to ever be fully exploited, BP has admitted, due to international concern about climate change.

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As the 19th century entered its final decade, the War of Currents was nearing its peak. On one side of this war was Thomas Edison, who had invested heavily in direct-current…

Bookmark

In my past postings, I’ve pointed out how the Anthropocene thesis can be roundly criticized for its assorted failings.

Bookmark

Climate change is an issue so big it can be paralysing. It doesn’t help with the paralysis that proposed solutions tend to be either hopelessly inadequate (change your lightbulbs! buy local!),…