by Ross Gelbspan

Posted 7 months ago A global public-works program to rewire the world with clean energy could solve many of our most pressing problems. Read More

Posted 1 year, 11 months ago  

 

As the pace of global warming kicks into overdrive, the hollow optimism of climate activists, along with the desperate responses of some of the world's most prominent climate scientists, is preventing us from focusing on the survival requirements of the human enterprise.

The environmental establishment continues to peddle the notion that we can solve the climate problem.

We can't.

We have failed to meet nature's deadline. In the next few years, this world will experience progressively more ominous and destabilizing changes. These will happen either incrementally… Read More

Posted 3 years, 5 months ago With growing numbers of scientists declaring that the global climate crisis is approaching a point of no return, there is a huge and bewildering disconnect between our physical world and our political environment. Our government's response to the prospect of runaway climate impacts is one of paralysis.

The negligence of the Bush administration is understandable. The White House has become the East Coast branch office of ExxonMobil and Peabody Energy. The fossil-fuel lobby is essentially writing the administration's climate and energy policies. As a result, climate change has become the preeminent case study of the contamination of our political system… Read More

Posted 4 years, 9 months ago The much-discussed Kyoto Protocol takes effect today, Feb. 16. In the face of the United States' continuing refusal to ratify the international agreement, a group of progressive activists is launching a drive to gather millions of signatures from U.S. citizens for a "People's Ratification of the Kyoto Global Warming Treaty." Ross Gelbspan, a Grist contributor and author of two books on climate change -- The Heat Is On and Boiling Point -- explains why you should put your coffee mug down and sign the petition today.

What on earth is a person supposed to… Read More

Posted 5 years, 4 months ago Under the administration of George W. Bush, the White House has become the East Coast branch office of ExxonMobil and Peabody Coal, and climate change has become the preeminent case study of the contamination of our political system by money. Read More

Posted 7 years, 3 months ago Inside the Beltway, the climate movement is comatose.

During the Clinton-Gore years, while the U.S. dragged its feet in international climate negotiations, the major national environmental groups allowed themselves to be used by the administration. Seduced by the former vice president's rhetoric, the groups watched their issue disappear from the political arena when Al Gore sacrificed his convictions to his ambitions and made global warming the subject of a personal vow of silence during his presidential campaign.

The inability of the nation's large, mainstream environmental groups to mobilize the public around the immense threat of climate change -- and their… Read More

Posted 9 years, 1 month ago Like the nine-foot-deep blanket of ice at the top of the world, America's denial of the climate crisis is melting.

And like the North Pole, it is melting from the top down.

Over the last year, in the wake of steady alarms from leaders of the insurance industry, growing numbers of oil and auto company executives have been undergoing a quiet but profound sea change in their responses to global warming.

At long last, that change is rapidly engulfing the… Read More

Posted 10 years, 2 months ago Announcements of the "hottest year in recorded history" are becoming annual events.

Evidence is mounting that drastic climatic changes are under way, driven by the 6 billion tons of heat-trapping carbon dioxide that humans pump into our atmosphere each year.

In 1998 alone, we saw a crippling ice storm in Quebec and New England; uncontrolled fires in Brazil, Mexico, and Florida; killer heat waves in the Middle East, Texas, and India; Mexico's worst drought in 70 years, followed by intense floods; massive flooding in China, which left 14 million… Read More