Carbon Shift: How the Twin Crises of Oil Depletion and Climate Change Will Define the Future argues that the crises of climate change and peaking oil production are really one: a carbon problem. The book brings together six world-class experts to explore where we stand now and where we might be headed. Learn more »
The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity and the Renewal of Civilization sets out a theory of the growth, crisis, and renewal of societies. Some kinds of crisis can open up extraordinary opportunities for creative, bold reform of our societies, if we’re prepared to exploit these opportunities when they arise. Learn more »
Is our world becoming too complex and too fast-paced to manage? The Ingenuity Gap argues that a dangerous gulf is opening between our need for practical, innovative ideas to solve our increasingly difficult problems and our actual supply of those ideas. Learn more »
Environment, Scarcity, and Violence shows how scarcities of critical renewable resources like cropland, fresh water, and forests will contribute to insurrections, ethnic clashes, urban unrest, and other forms of civil violence in poor countries. Learn more »
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10 results found for: Climate Change
Resolved: The oil sands industry is distorting Canada’s economy and eroding its democracy in ways that will exact an enormous cost on our society over the long term. THOMAS HOMER-DIXON How the oil sands industry is distorting Canada’s democracy and economy By 2030, Canada’s output from the oil sands will reach about five million [...]
President Obama rejected the pipeline last year but now must decide whether to approve a new proposal from TransCanada, the pipeline company. Saying no won’t stop tar sands development by itself, because producers are busy looking for other export routes — west across the Rockies to the Pacific Coast, east to Quebec, or south by rail to the United States. Each alternative faces political, technical or economic challenges as opponents fight to make the industry unviable.
Those who deny the reality or significance of climate change often say Arctic sea ice also shrank dramatically as recently as the 1930s, so what’s happening now is just part of a natural long-term fluctuation. But the best recent analysis, published in the top scientific journal Nature last November, says that “both the duration and magnitude of the current decline in sea ice seem to be unprecedented for the past 1,450 years” and that the recent decline is “consistent with [human-caused] warming.”
People may not care much about climate change, but most do care about the price of food because it affects their everyday lives. Fears about imperiled food security may be our best hope for breaking through widespread climate-change denial and generating the political pressure to do something, finally, about the problem.
Exploring the Climate “Mindscape”: an interview in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
The climate change problem might ultimately reside as much in our heads as in the external world. Researchers need to map the “mindscape,” a virtual space within which most of the world’s people are clustered in a few ideologically polarized groups. Vast, unexplored regions of the mindscape, he says, may offer new ways of thinking about problems such as climate change and new ways of living together successfully in the future.”
An article in the journal Ambio
Ongoing and rapid rapid changes in the physical environment of the marine Arctic will push components of the region’s existing social-ecological systems beyond tipping points and into new regimes. We emphasize the need to understand the Arctic’s role in an increasingly nonlinear world; then we describe emerging evidence on the connectivity of system components from the subarctic seas surrounding northern North America; and finally we propose an approach to allow northern residents to observe, adapt and—if necessary—transform the social-ecological system with which they live.
There’s really only one label for the pathetic exercise we’ve just witnessed in South Africa: deceit. The whole climate-change negotiation process and the larger political discourse surrounding this horrible problem is a drawn-out and elaborate exercise in lying—to each other, to ourselves, and especially to our children. And the lies are starting to corrupt our civilization from inside out.
Radio Ecoshock Podcast: “Wicked Problems & Solutions.” Normal approaches to science and policy cannot solve wicked problems, like climate change, energy scarcity, or economic crisis.
Video: A CIGI Inside the Issues interview with David Welch on climate change. View the interview.
In January, 2011, I published an article on the limits to economic growth in a collection of comments on “Unconventional Wisdom: Economies Can’t Just Keep on Growing” in Foreign Policy. “Humanity has made great strides over the past 2,000 years, and we often assume that our path, notwithstanding a few bumps along the way, goes ever upward. But we are wrong: Within this century, environmental and resource constraints will likely bring global economic growth to a halt.”
