Blog Post / Climate Justice
Last week, Reuters released a major investigative piece on climate finance The authors examined 10% of climate finance flows reported by developed countries to the UN, finding that: “at least $3 billion spent not on solar panels or wind farms but on coal-fired power, airports, crime-fighting or other programs that…
Blog Post / Climate Justice
One of the bigger stories of this past weekend came with the bland heading “California New Business Update” – State Farm, the biggest homeowner insurance company in California, is no longer accepting new homeowner or property insurance applications from anyone in California. The reasons? Rising construction costs, “rapidly growing catastrophe…
Insight / Climate Justice
The first meeting of the Loss & Damage Transitional Committee (TC) has just finished in Luxor, Egypt. The mandate of the TC is to make recommendations to COP28 (the next major UN climate negotiations, set for Dubai in December this year) about funding arrangements for addressing loss & damage, including…
Insight / Climate Justice
Last November, we won a stunning victory at the UN climate negotiations in Egypt, as the world agreed to create a fund to support developing countries in coping with “Loss and Damage” from climate change. What was agreed in Decision 2/CP.27 is merely an empty shell: a promise to create…
Blog Post / Climate Justice
In the title and subhead of her COP27 wrap-up article for The New Republic, Kate Aronoff accurately conveys the magnitude of what happened in Sharm el Sheikh, Egypt at the latest round of UN climate negotiations: “How the U.S. Abruptly Shifted Decades of Climate Policy: In just 72 hours, the…
Blog Post / Politics & Economics
The Guardian has the latest exhibit of “Corporations don’t care if you die” in a story about Big Pharma objecting to a South African company replicating Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine: Moderna has filed several patents in South Africa and has refused to cooperate and share technology with the hub in Africa,…
Blog Post / Climate Justice
NPR’s Ari Shapiro has a good article out today about the links between climate change, migration, and the rise of far-right ethno-nationalist politics. (Whenever this comes up I will always re-share my colleague Teresa Anderson’s sketch of this vicious cycle from several years ago.) Particularly useful in this piece is…
Blog Post / Climate Justice
A decade and a half ago, “climate justice” was presented as a radical alternative to the prevailing narrative about climate change which conceived of the problem as purely an environmental crisis, with relatively simple technical solutions (i.e. faster adoption of renewable energy sources). Activists, especially from the Global South, highlighted…
Blog Post / Climate Justice
A couple of weeks ago, the news circulated that a massive part of the Greenland ice sheet is going to melt regardless of what climate action the world takes. This could trigger up to a foot of sea level rise in the coming decades, which would have catastrophic consequences. As…
Blog Post / Climate Justice
Yesterday Nature published a new analysis estimating the social cost of carbon in the United States at $185/ton, more than triple the current estimate used by the federal government in calculating the monetary impact of greenhouse gas emissions (and therefore of policies that would reduce or increase those emissions). The…