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Tag: climate change

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Donald Trump Is Trying to Destroy the Planet
March 30, 2017
The way to the push the administration is from the bottom up. In other words, to build a bulwark of political will in cities and states, a bulwark of resistance so that regardless of what the federal government does, states are invested in building a clean energy future. That is ...

The Slow Confiscation of Everything
February 17, 2017
There will be no definite moment can say that yes, today we are fucked, and yesterday we were unfucked. Instead the fuckery increases incrementally year on year, until this is the way the world ends: not with a bang, not with a bonfire, but with the slow and savage confiscation ...

By What Authority?
November 23, 2016
The 1890 massacre of as many as 300 Lakota men, women, and children at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, by a U.S. Army regiment was precipitated by a Ghost Dance. The dance was originally envisioned by a Paiute shaman in Nevada, a turning point in a prophesy of his in which Jesus ...

Con Air
November 03, 2016
It seems entirely fitting that in the final stretch of a presidential campaign militantly indifferent to a host of policy crises, from climate change to wealth inequality, from antitrust prosecutions to affordable housing, the American public is left to gnaw maliciously on a ...

It Sounds Like a Melody
June 25, 2015
Pope Francis’s recently released Laudato Si, or “Praise Be to You,” has been called “the climate encyclical” and “the environmental encyclical”—but while it’s true that the papal missive does address climate change, ...

He’s the King of Saving the World
April 07, 2015
Let us pause for a moment to recognize how much we as a society owe to Leonardo DiCaprio. I myself became aware of DiCaprio in the glory days of the 1990s, when he ushered “I’m the king of the world!” into our shared vocabulary—his earliest, and perhaps greatest, social ...

Selling the Wind
April 06, 2015
Would someone please tell the Guaraní of Guaraqueçaba in Brazil that their land is now a carbon “offset”? That’s ecological jargon for “get the hell out.” The Guaraní aren’t alone, either. Some of the Earth’s lowest carbon footprints are being wiped out in the ...

Research for Rent, Solutions for Sale
January 06, 2015
“America’s think tank sector is far bigger, and far more influential, than most people realize,” Hans Gutbrod, a Thomas Pynchon character and the executive director of nonprofit think tank watchdog Transparify, said recently. “This underlines the importance for think ...

Gambling on Armageddon
December 30, 2014
When oil giant Mobil donated land containing the Texas City Prairie Preserve to the Nature Conservancy–America’s largest environmental group–in 1995, wildlife conservationists breathed a sigh of relief. At last, the endangered prairie chicken that had been threatened for ...

The Military’s Latest Enemy: Climate Change
November 05, 2014
To say that the United States military has its hands full right now is a bit of an understatement. We might not have anywhere near the troop deployment levels reached during the height of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—and there have been modest cuts to the defense ...

Cigarettes and Climate Change
July 02, 2014
I am a smoker, and I am in denial. It isn’t that I don’t believe that cigarettes will kill me. I do. It isn’t that I don’t believe that I’m addicted. I know I am. Like most addicts, my denial takes the form of dissonance: I rationalize, I procrastinate, I make token ...

Billionaire Donors and True Believers
April 23, 2014
Democrat billionaires are always looking for an excuse to justify their outsized political spending. Aren’t liberals supposed to be against the wealthy few pouring great gobs of money into the political system? How can they justify railing against this state of affairs while ...