Carbon cycles regulate the Earth’s temperature and provide essential elements of life. Capitalist industry and agriculture are disrupting those vital life support systems
Metabolic Rifts
Archive | Greenhouse Gas
Global heat
Atmospheric carbon dioxide level hits all-time high
Seventh consecutive year of steep increases leads to the highest greenhouse gas concentration recorded in 61 years of observations
Book review
Biofuels: A pseudo-green scam that only enriches agribusiness
Ethanol and biodiesel boost corporate profits while doing nothing to solve the world’s growing social and environmental crises
Science is clear
New study: Greenhouse gas is more dangerous than regulators thought
New evidence not only strengthens the EPA’s 2009 endangerment finding, it shows that greenhouse gas impacts could be much worse than expected
Heating the Greenhouse
Global warming illustrated: 800,000 years of CO2 in one graph
This year’s increase in carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels and industry is the largest in seven years. CO2 in the atmosphere has hit a new high.
Book review
Fossil fuel production and use exploded in the 20th century. Can we stop the flow in the 21st?
In ‘Burning Up’ Simon Pirani shows why fossil fuel consumption has grown so fast, and why only radical social change can prevent climate disaster now
Climate change vs biodiversity
Greenhouse gases and mass extinctions: Speed kills
In past warming events, atmospheric CO2 rose too fast for many species to adapt. Today it is rising 10 times faster than at any time in 66 million years.
Review
Climate change in the Anthropocene: An unstoppable drive to Hothouse Earth?
Can the global climate be stabilized before runaway change creates conditions that are too hot for human civilization and deadly for most species?
Emissions rising
Energy and Climate Change: No progress in 20 years
BP statistics show we are far from meeting the emission reduction targets adopted in the Paris Agreement. In 2017, we took a step backwards.
Corporate liars exposed
Shell knew about climate threat decades ago
Secret documents reveal that the giant oil company’s scientists warned executives about the global impact of fossil fuels as early as 1981
Science is Clear
“There is no convincing alternative explanation”
The new U.S. Climate Science Special Report is unequivocal: climate change is real, it is caused by human activity, especially greenhouse gas emissions, and it is getting more dangerous every day
Hothouse World
Greenhouse gas concentrations surge to new record
‘The last time the Earth experienced a comparable concentration of CO2 was 3-5 million years ago, the temperature was 2-3°C warmer and sea level was 10-20 meters higher than now.’
Ecosocialist Debate
Memo to Jacobin: Ecomodernism is not ecosocialism
Ian Angus challenges a left-wing magazine that promotes geoengineering, nuclear power, carbon storage and other techno-fixes as solutions to climate change.
GHG Reduction
Planting trees cannot replace cutting CO2 emissions
‘Save the planet: Plant a Tree!’ It sounds good, but scientists say we can’t avoid dangerous climate change without rapid cuts in fossil fuel use, starting now.
Build Peoples Climate March!
CO2 over 410 for the first time in human history
As Trump stops climate action and Trudeau promotes tar sands, atmospheric carbon dioxide reaches highest levels in millions of years.
emissions crisis
Carbon dioxide levels now rising at record speed
CO2 growth rate sets new record in 2015-16. Increase in the past ten years is 100 to 200 times as fast as the increase that ended the last ice age
The Fire This Time
Trump Against the Planet
John Bellamy Foster: This administration is not just a cabal of ignoramuses. Behind the right’s climate denial is the economic reality that seriously combating capitalism’s war on the planet requires the defeat of the system.
Climate Negotiations
COP22: Can we UNF*CK the UNFCCC?
The outcome of the latest UN climate negotiations is a page of bold promises, stirring calls, and grand statements, woefully empty of anything actionable.
Climate Change
Greenhouse Gas Escalation, Illustrated
We don’t need models or computer projections. As these graphics show, we already face a planetary emergency, and it is getting more serious every day.
Volkswagen chose profit over the planet
The auto giant only did what the capitalist system demands of every corporation: it put profit first, no matter who got hurt