The rising risk of nuclear war. Donald Trump’s 2016 election. Vast clouds of wildfire smoke. A global pandemic. These four things seem like apples and oranges, but they share one key similarity: each signals that something is going awry in the story of human progress.
What’s happening in response to the worldwide spread of the SARS CoV-2 virus (and COVID-19, the disease it causes) is a vivid example of a global ‘tipping event,’ in which multiple social systems flip simultaneously to a distinctly new state.
with Yonatan Strauch | Is Canada going to be the first country to break apart over the issue of climate change? That may seem like a hyperbolic question. But the fissures in our federation over climate and energy policy are now extraordinarily deep, and there’s little sign that they’ll close soon.
A poster widely circulated on the web highlights text that was purportedly written by me saying that wind power inevitably suffers an energetic deficit. The poster is fraudulent.
by Gordon Kent | Alberta needs to start shifting quickly out of the oilsands to avoid serious economic trouble as the world moves away from fossil fuels, a University of Waterloo professor says.
by Maurice Smith | Alberta chose the wrong path when it doubled down on the “junk energy” contained in the oilsands in recent years, and must move fast to join the energy transition away from fossil fuels if it hopes to avoid falling off the climate change cliff.
In May’s provincial election, the Green Party won its first multiple-seat breakthrough in North America, and by a fluke of electoral arithmetic, it now holds the balance of power in the legislature. Today, B.C.’s citizens are exploring uncharted political territory of potentially huge significance to people outside the province.
Donald Trump needs a war. He needs a war to fire Robert Mueller. Special counsel Mueller oversees an aggressively expanding investigation of Russia’s efforts to influence the 2016 presidential election…
U.S. President Donald Trump loves to play chicken – the game of chicken, that is. And while his predilection toward the game is bad enough, it also turns out that he plays it badly, and that’s truly scary.
by Rachel Nuwer | The political economist Benjamin Friedman once compared modern Western society to a stable bicycle whose wheels are kept spinning by economic growth. Should that forward-propelling motion slow or cease, the pillars that define our society would begin to teeter.
