Climate Change’s Costs Hit the Plate

2017-10-11T19:08:05-04:00July 24th, 2012|Climate Change, Environment and Energy|

In the mid-1980s, when I was a doctoral student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and beginning to study climate change, I attended a lecture by a specialist in plant physiology at nearby Harvard University. He spoke about global warming’s impact on crop productivity. He was quite optimistic. More carbon dioxide in the air, he explained, causes certain kinds of plants to grow faster. So, on balance, food output should rise in a warmer and CO2-rich world.

Detecting and Coping with Disruptive Shocks in Arctic Marine Systems: A Resilience Approach to Place and People

2017-09-11T00:22:46-04:00January 22nd, 2012|Academic, Ecology and Sustainability, Environment and Energy, Featured (Academic)|

Eddy Carmack, Thomas Homer-Dixon, et al. | It seems inevitable that the ongoing and rapid changes in the physical environment of the marine Arctic will push components of the region’s existing social-ecological systems—small and large—beyond tipping points and into new regimes.

Climate Summit Was a Pathetic Exercise in Deceit

2017-10-11T19:08:12-04:00December 12th, 2011|Climate Change, Environment and Energy|

There’s really only one label for the pathetic exercise we’ve just witnessed in South Africa: deceit. The whole climate-change negotiation process and the larger political discourse surrounding this horrible problem is a drawn-out and elaborate exercise in lying—to each other, to ourselves, and especially to our children. And the lies are starting to corrupt our civilization from inside out.

Tipping Toward Sustainability: Emerging Pathways of Transformation

2017-09-11T00:26:11-04:00October 6th, 2011|Academic, Ecology and Sustainability, Environment and Energy|

Frances Westley, Thomas Homer-Dixon, et al. | This article explores the links between agency, institutions, and innovation in navigating shifts and largescale transformations toward global sustainability. Our central question is whether social and technical innovations can reverse the trends that are challenging critical thresholds and creating tipping points in the earth system, and if not, what conditions are necessary to escape the current lock-in.

Our Fukushima Moment

2017-05-31T18:20:50-04:00March 18th, 2011|Energy, Environment and Energy|

A quarter of a century after we first heard it, the word “Chernobyl” stands in our minds for technological calamity borne of incompetence. Environmentalists used the label to deliver a near-fatal blow to the nuclear power industry. What will Fukushima mean to us in 2036, and how will we have used the label to change our world?

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