3 December 2020 Jeff Goodell Nowhere has the political power of coal been more obvious than in presidential campaigns.
3 December 2020 Jeff Goodell Bill Gates is a relative newcomer to the fight against global warming, but he’s already shifting the debate over climate change.
3 December 2020 Jeff Goodell In the world of energy politics, the sudden vanishing of the word ‘coal’ is a remarkable and unprecedented event.
3 December 2020 Jeff Goodell Climate change is a global issue – from the point of view of the Earth’s climate, a molecule of CO2 emitted in Bejing is the same as a molecule emitted in Sydney.
3 December 2020 Jeff Goodell Bloomberg is famously impatient with beltway politics and believes that to get anything done you need to work from the ground up.
3 December 2020 Jeff Goodell Drill everything, mine everything, roll back regulations, tweak the science, expedite permits. Sound familiar? The Republicans offer up more 19th-Century solutions to our 21st-Century energy problems.
3 December 2020 Jeff Goodell But Big Oil and Big Coal have always been as skilled at propaganda as they are at mining and drilling. Like the tobacco industry before them, their success depends on keeping Americans stupid.
3 December 2020 Jeff Goodell Among all the tests President Obama faced in his first term, his biggest failure was climate change.
3 December 2020 Jeff Goodell Obama wants to be thought of as the president who freed us from foreign oil. But if he doesn’t show some political courage, he may well be remembered as the president who cooked the planet.
3 December 2020 Jeff Goodell Bloomberg’s $50 million is not going to revolutionize the electric power industry. But his willingness to fight is already inspiring others to see Big Coal differently.
3 December 2020 Jeff Goodell The coal industry is an even larger part of the Australian economy than it is of the American, and it has an enormous amount of political power.
3 December 2020 Jeff Goodell Maybe more climate activists will think about the climate change not as an international problem to be resolved in an air-conditioned meeting hall, but as a guerilla war to be fought in the streets.
3 December 2020 Jeff Goodell Extracting oil from the tar sands is a nasty, polluting, energy-intensive business.
3 December 2020 Jeff Goodell With nine degrees of warming, computer models project that Australia will look like a disaster movie. Habitats for most vertebrates will vanish. Water supply to the Murray-Darling Basin will fall by half, severely curtailing food production.
3 December 2020 Jeff Goodell When it comes to energy, cost isn’t everything – but it’s a lot. Everybody wants cheap power.
3 December 2020 Jeff Goodell The biggest tab the public picks up for fossil fuels has to do with what economists call ‘external costs,’ like the health effects of air and water pollution.
3 December 2020 Jeff Goodell In the U.S. alone, weather disasters caused $50 billion in economic damages in 2010.
3 December 2020 Jeff Goodell One thing you can say about nuclear power: the people who believe it is the silver bullet for America’s energy problems never give up.
3 December 2020 Jeff Goodell Geoengineering – the deliberate, large-scale manipulation of the earth’s climate to offset global warming – is a nightmare fix for climate change.
3 December 2020 Jeff Goodell If you are interested enough in the climate crisis to read this post, you probably know that 2 degrees Centigrade of warming (or 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) is the widely acknowledged threshold for “dangerous” climate change.
3 December 2020 Jeff Goodell Americans don’t pay much attention to environmental issues, because they aren’t sexy. I mean, cleaning up coal plants and reining in outlaw frackers is hugely important work, but it doesn’t get anybody’s pulse racing.
3 December 2020 Jeff Goodell In the United States, we do a pretty good job of protecting iconic landscapes and postcard views, but the ocean gets no respect.
3 December 2020 Jeff Goodell Have we failed to slow global warming pollution in part because climate and environmental activists have been too polite and well behaved?
3 December 2020 Jeff Goodell Australia is the only island continent on the planet, which means that changes caused by planet-warming pollution – warmer seas, which can drive stronger storms, and more acidic oceans, which wreak havoc on the food chain – are even more deadly here.
