by Steven T. Corneliussen (Physics Today) To mitigate climate change, has the planet “gambled its future on the appearance in a puff of smoke of a carbon-sucking fairy godmother”? During the Paris climate summit late last year, European policy analyst Oliver Geden’s...
COP21
ETC’s Irreverent Review of 2015… and (possibly) Irrelevant Preview of 2016
Download the full review here. The Year that Ended Dangerously If El Niño weren’t enough, the extraordinary winds that struck Yemen and Mexico’s Pacific Coast were matched by record-breaking forest fires in the Indonesian archipelago, droughts, torrential rains and...
The hidden agenda: how veiled techno – utopias shore up the Paris Agreement
by Kevin Anderson (kevinanderson.info) The Paris Agreement is a genuine triumph of international diplomacy and of how the French people brought an often fractious world together to see beyond national self interest. Moreover, the agreement is testament to how...
The dubious promise of bioenergy plus carbon capture
by Richard Martin (MIT Technology Review) Climate change agreements rest on negative emissions technologies that may be unachievable. While many scientists and climate change activists hailed December’s Paris agreement as a historic step forward for international...
Sign-on letter: No to 1.5°C with geoengineering!
Paris, 11 December 2015 Seemingly out of the blue (or rather, out of the black smog of the UNFCCC process), some of the largest historical culprits for climate change, countries including the United States, Canada and the European Union, have decided to back an...
The Phantom of the COP21 Opera: bioenergy with carbon capture and storage
by Oliver Munnion, Global Forest Coalition blog Yesterday I went to a briefing at the COP21 summit on how realistic achieving a 1.5 degree target as part of the Paris climate deal is, as opposed to the 2 degree target that was first proposed. At the end of the...
COP21’s climate technofix: spinning carbon into gold and the myth of ‘negative emissions’
by Rachel Smolker, The Ecologist Paris has been awash with hype about 'CO2 recycling' and 'carbon neutral' or even 'carbon negative' technologies based on burning millions of trees, writes Rachel Smolker. But the alchemical notion that waste carbon can be spun into...
Techno-Optimism and Bad Science in Paris: The Problem With Carbon Capture and Storage
by Almuth Ernsting, Truthout UN climate conferences provide a platform for advocating real solutions to the climate crisis - but also for selling and promoting false ones. At the climate conference this and next week in Paris, many civil society groups and social...