urban planning

News & Comments, Smart cities October 20, 2021

City climate leadership a model for sustainability

The United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals give us a global blueprint, but our cities have a key role to play in transformative change The United Nations’…

Articles Climate Change Policy & Strategy

Ipcc climate report: Profound changes are underway in Earth’s oceans and ice – a lead author explains what the warnings mean

Humans are unequivocally warming the planet, and that’s triggering rapid changes in the atmosphere, oceans and polar regions, and increasing extreme weather around the world, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warns in a new report. The IPCC released the…

Articles Nature & Environment

Nature Is Not a Machine—We Treat It So at Our Peril

Climate change, avers Rex Tillerson, ex-CEO of ExxonMobil and erstwhile US Secretary of State, “is an engineering problem, and it has engineering solutions.” This brief statement encapsulates how the metaphor of the machine underlies the way our mainstream culture views…

Articles Nature & Environment

Smell something, tell something

Spanline Dixon, a retired teacher’s aide, is used to unpleasant smells. Her home in Brunswick, Ga. is near a waste and recycling facility, a water pollution control plant, and two facilities that emit toxic chemicals into the air: a pulp…

Articles Climate Change Nature & Environment

Are Brazil’s Amazon Policies ‘Crimes Against Humanity’?

On a tuesday afternoon in late March 2020, Zezico Rodrigues Guajajara was killed by gunmen as he was driving a motorbike near his home village on the Araribóia reservation in Maranhao, Brazil. A member of the Guajajara tribe, he had worked…

Articles Climate Change Nature & Environment

Old and new solutions pave way to net-zero emissions farming, studies show

New and emerging technologies could pave the way to net-zero carbon emissions agriculture in the next two decades, according to a study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) last month. A host of new and emerging agricultural technologies…

Articles Nuclear

Why Europe cannot afford to shun nuclear power

With the EU Parliament’s approval of the European Commission’s package of legislative proposals on climate and energy, the bloc’s ambitious emissions reduction targets of least 55% below 1990 levels by 2030, are now legally-binding. The vote on 24 June reinforces the EU’s commitment to…

Articles Oil Policy & Strategy

Inside Exxon’s playbook: How America’s biggest oil company continues to oppose action on climate change

ExxonMobil continues to fight efforts to tackle climate change in the United States, despite publicly claiming to support the Paris climate agreement, an undercover investigation by Unearthed has found. A senior lobbyist for Exxon told an undercover reporter that the…

Articles Hydrogen Power to X Sustainability

Is hydrogen the new oil?

The Tokyo Olympics will be powered by a fuel with ambition – hydrogen. The Olympic flame is already burning it. The Olympic village will be powered by hydrogen made at a solar power plant in the exclusion zone created after the Fukushima…

Articles Policy & Strategy

The last hurrah

“Build back better. Blah, blah, blah. Green economy. Blah blah blah. Net-zero by 2050. Blah, blah, blah. This is all we hear from our so-called leaders. Words that sound great but so far have not led to action. Our hopes…

Articles Coal

The role of China’s carbon price in phasing out coal

After years of negotiations, planning, and pilot testing, China’s national carbon emissions trading system (ETS) finally went online at the Shanghai Environment and Energy Exchange on 16 July 2021. China expects its ETS to become the largest carbon market in…

The Lost Bayou: Grand Bayou

Grand Bayou, LA. At one time, it was a lively community of close-knit families, until they were forced to leave. ©2020. Garde Voir Ci magazine. Nicholls State University Department of Mass Communication.

World Rainforest Day

Rainforests cover only 2 percent of the planet’s surface area but are responsible for more than 25% of all Western medicine and house more than 50% of the world’s plant and animal species.