How Big Coal Keeps America Stupid
The New York Times has a good piece today about the $153 million ad blitz the fossil fuel industry is running to oust President Obama. The Times points out that this is a big change from the last election when green ads greatly outnumbered those for fossil fuels and global warming was openly discussed. And … Read more
Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math Part 6 by Bill McKibben
It’s not clear, of course, that the power of the fossil-fuel industry can be broken. The U.K. analysts who wrote the Carbon Tracker report and drew attention to these numbers had a relatively modest goal – they simply wanted to remind investors that climate change poses a very real risk to the stock prices of … Read more
Global Warming’s Terrifying new math – Part 5 by Bill McKibben
So: the paths we have tried to tackle global warming have so far produced only gradual, halting shifts. A rapid, transformative change would require building a movement, and movements require enemies. As John F. Kennedy put it, “The civil rights movement should thank God for Bull Connor. He’s helped it as much as Abraham Lincoln.” … Read more
Global Warnings terrifying new math – Part 4 by Bill McKibben
If you told Exxon or Lukoil that, in order to avoid wrecking the climate, they couldn’t pump out their reserves, the value of their companies would plummet. John Fullerton, a former managing director at JP Morgan who now runs the Capital Institute, calculates that at today’s market value, those 2,795 gigatons of carbon emissions are … Read more
Global Warnings terrifying new math – Part 3 by Bill McKibben
The Third Number: 2,795 Gigatons This number is the scariest of all – one that, for the first time, meshes the political and scientific dimensions of our dilemma. It was highlighted last summer by the Carbon Tracker Initiative, a team of London financial analysts and environmentalists who published a report in an effort to educate … Read more
Global Warnings terrifying new math – Part 2 by Bill McKibben
The Second Number: 565 Gigatons Scientists estimate that humans can pour roughly 565 more gigatons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere by midcentury and still have some reasonable hope of staying below two degrees. (“Reasonable,” in this case, means four chances in five, or somewhat worse odds than playing Russian roulette with a six-shooter.) This … Read more
Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math part 1 – by Bill McKibben
If the pictures of those towering wildfires in Colorado haven’t convinced you, or the size of your AC bill this summer, here are some hard numbers about climate change: June broke or tied 3,215 high-temperature records across the United States. That followed the warmest May on record for the Northern Hemisphere – the 327th consecutive … Read more
