toward a just and sustainable world
What first comes to my mind about “boat people” are families in rickety boats fleeing from Vietnam in the last days of that war, and now the climate and war refugees in capsizing boats, drowning in the Mediterranean, Caribbean, and other oceans and seas. And emergency comes to mind reading about the climate and … Read more Deconstructing Boats on the Eve of Glasgow COP26
A lead human-interest story in the weekend Wheels section of a major Canadian newspaper is about a 2-car family’s transitioning from a hybrid to an EV as they “try to be more sustainable”. They upgrade their daily car every few years to seek “improvements in fuel efficiency, reliability and technology”. Electric vehicles (EVs) are … Read more Deconstructing Electric Vehicles on the Eve of Glasgow COP26
Today we face at least three overlapping, existential crises: militarism, the climate crisis and the collapse of biodiversity. While interrelated in many complex ways, these are separate threats, in that solving one will not eliminate the others. Climate change is certainly exacerbating the decline of species in countless ways. However, stopping climate change (if … Read more Science for Peace in the Decisive Decade
Emissions of greenhouse gases by automobile internal combustion engines and thermal electric power plants could be largely eliminated by moving over to wind and solar power sources, with storage provided by lithium-ion and sodium-ion batteries. This move is partly underway. In 2019, sales of electric cars, nearly all of them powered by lithium-ion batteries, … Read more Climate preservation with lithium-ion and sodium-ion batteries
In Elon Musk, Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future, science writer Ashlee Vance has described a prodigy who has revolutionized three industries at once – space-capable rockets, electric cars and solar energy. Elon Musk is now one of the wealthiest men on the planet. His electric car company, Tesla, is now producing … Read more Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future: A Review
Greenhouse Gases. The atmospheric CO2 concentration in 2020, worldwide, was almost 50% above the pre-industrial concentration (412 ppmv vs 280 ppmv, a 47% increase), the CH4 concentration was almost three times the pre-industrial concentration (1875 ppb vs 675 ppb, a factor of 2.78 increase), and the N2O concentration about 20% larger (330 ppb vs … Read more 10 Essential Facts about the Climate Crisis
WARNING: The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has moved the hands of the doomsday clock to 100 seconds to midnight (human extinction) because of the risks of nuclear war and climate disruption. ORIGINS: Nuclear weapons were developed by the US, UK, and Canada in the Manhattan Project in World War II. The US dropped … Read more Ten Things You Need to Know about Nuclear Weapons
Le changement climatique et ses effets sur notre environnement et nos sociétés sont désormais indéniables. Afin de réfléchir à la manière dont les politiques doivent réagir face à l’urgence climatique, il est tout d’abord important de qualifier le changement climatique de menace à la sécurité. Pour se faire, le concept de sécurité doit être … Read more L’interrelation des enjeux climatiques et sécuritaires
Jim Morrison observed that you don’t get outta here alive. Though Morrison had a point, Kim Stanley Robinson sketches an optimistic scenario in which we – or many of us – do get out of the climate emergency alive. Robinson, in a book of 530 dense pages entitled The Ministry for the Future, mixes … Read more Climate Emergency: Getting Out Alive
Guy Roberts was invited to give a keynote talk at the 2021 Congress of the Canadian Peace Research Association. [1 ] Roberts had played a role in composing the Pentagon’s Nuclear Posture Review 2018 (NPR 2018) under the Trump administration. He is now playing a role in composing the new NPR that the Biden … Read more US Nuclear Strategy: A Critique of Guy Roberts’s Defence of Deterrence