Daniel Rourke /stream

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Modern technology seems always to have been judged according to its utility for human beings. To the extent that technologies have been viewed as tools, instruments, or prostheses for human use, and thus under human control, they have…

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The communications industry could use 20% of all the world’s electricity by 2025, hampering attempts to meet climate change targets and straining grids as demand by power-hungry server farms storing digital data from billions of smartphones, tablets and…

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RISING Dispatches from the New American Shore By Elizabeth Rush Illustrated. 299 pp. Milkweed Editions. $26. A drowned world: It’s an ancient fear and a very old story.

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I recently created a thread that on Twitter regarding the lower-bound estimates for how much electricity the Bitcoin blockchain consumed using publicly available numbers. The first part of this post is a slightly modified version of that thread.

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Veganism has rocketed in the UK over the past couple of years – from an estimated half a million people in 2016 to more than 3.5 million – 5% of our population – today.

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Let’s face it: reading stories about the ongoing destruction of planet Earth, the life-sustaining blue marble that all of us – aside from maybe Elon Musk – are permanently trapped on, has got to be one of the…

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Over the past few years, I’ve heard dozens of scientists talk about solar geo-engineering, the once-outlandish idea that humanity should counteract climate change by releasing special gases into the stratosphere to reflect away sunlight and cool the planet.

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The novella-length piece represents the kind of media commitment that the climate crisis has long deserved but almost never received.

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Researchers in Sweden examined the possible steps that people can take to help tackle the climate crisis. Although a lot of resulting news coverage focused on the most effective action (having one fewer kid), the real takeaway is…

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It brought riches to Britain and many other European nations; played a major role in enslaving more than 10 million Africans; and created the first global markets in cotton, tobacco and sugar. But now colonialism has been accused…

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This is what happens when you turn the natural world into a profit-making machine. By and Jason W Moore The most telling symbol of the modern era isn’t the automobile or the smartphone. It’s the chicken nugget.

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We’re Solarpunk because the only other options are denial or despair. —Adam Flynn1 By now, dystopia may have become a luxury genre. Indulging in miserable future scenarios is not something everyone has time for.

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Limiting global warming to two degrees Celsius will not prevent destructive and deadly climate impacts, as once hoped, dozens of experts concluded in a score of scientific studies released Monday. A world that heats up by 2C (3.

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How an extreme libertarian tract predicting the collapse of liberal democracies – written by Jacob Rees-Mogg’s father – inspired the likes of Peter Thiel to buy up property across the Pacific by If you’re interested in the end…

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“Join our team on this special voyage that equips leaders with resources and actionable solutions to become a part of a global force of change.” This isn’t the description for Doctors Without Borders. It’s for a luxury Antarctic…

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The Triassic Period was a gnarly time to be alive on Earth, and not only because it was Act One of the age of dinosaurs. This epoch stretched from 251 to 199 million years ago, and was bookended…

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Bitcoin “miners” are electromagnetic alchemists, effectively turning megawatt-hours of electricity into the world’s fastest-growing currency.

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The Triassic Period was a gnarly time to be alive on Earth, and not only because it was Act One of the age of dinosaurs. This epoch stretched from 251 to 199 million years ago, and was bookended…

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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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For decades, as astronomers have imagined advanced extraterrestrial civilizations, they categorized such worlds by the amount of energy their inhabitants might conceivably be able to harness and use.

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Modern technology seems always to have been judged according to its utility for human beings. To the extent that technologies have been viewed as tools, instruments, or prostheses for human use, and thus under human control, they have…

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Skip to main content Advertisement More Like This Advertisement More Like This More Interviews See All

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Below is a shortened version of Annie Culver’s essay that won Honorable Mention in the 2017 Greene Prize for Environmental Writing. Annie is a PhD student in English at Rice University.

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RISING Dispatches from the New American Shore By Elizabeth Rush Illustrated. 299 pp. Milkweed Editions. $26. A drowned world: It’s an ancient fear and a very old story.

Bookmark

Veganism has rocketed in the UK over the past couple of years – from an estimated half a million people in 2016 to more than 3.5 million – 5% of our population – today.

Bookmark

A friend of mine flew from northern California, to North Carolina on Saturday night and was immediately surprised by what she encountered when she landed. “Why is it so hot here?” she texted before she was even out…

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Over the past few years, I’ve heard dozens of scientists talk about solar geo-engineering, the once-outlandish idea that humanity should counteract climate change by releasing special gases into the stratosphere to reflect away sunlight and cool the planet.

Bookmark

The novella-length piece represents the kind of media commitment that the climate crisis has long deserved but almost never received.

Bookmark

Researchers in Sweden examined the possible steps that people can take to help tackle the climate crisis. Although a lot of resulting news coverage focused on the most effective action (having one fewer kid), the real takeaway is…

Bookmark

After three record-breaking hurricanes hammered America last year, the influential spiritual healer Heather Askinosie wrote a blog post for the Earth.

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This is what happens when you turn the natural world into a profit-making machine. By and Jason W Moore The most telling symbol of the modern era isn’t the automobile or the smartphone. It’s the chicken nugget.

Bookmark

We’re Solarpunk because the only other options are denial or despair. —Adam Flynn1 By now, dystopia may have become a luxury genre. Indulging in miserable future scenarios is not something everyone has time for.

Bookmark

Language bends and buckles under pressure of climate change. Take the adjective ‘glacial’. I recently came across an old draft of my PhD dissertation on which my advisor had scrawled the rebuke: ‘You’re proceeding at a glacial pace.…

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How an extreme libertarian tract predicting the collapse of liberal democracies – written by Jacob Rees-Mogg’s father – inspired the likes of Peter Thiel to buy up property across the Pacific by If you’re interested in the end…

Bookmark

“Join our team on this special voyage that equips leaders with resources and actionable solutions to become a part of a global force of change.” This isn’t the description for Doctors Without Borders. It’s for a luxury Antarctic…

Bookmark

The Triassic Period was a gnarly time to be alive on Earth, and not only because it was Act One of the age of dinosaurs. This epoch stretched from 251 to 199 million years ago, and was bookended…

Bookmark

Bitcoin “miners” are electromagnetic alchemists, effectively turning megawatt-hours of electricity into the world’s fastest-growing currency.

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 in the late 18th century. In this…

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For decades, as astronomers have imagined advanced extraterrestrial civilizations, they categorized such worlds by the amount of energy their inhabitants might conceivably be able to harness and use.

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 your mind, hanging in space. Spin it…