Environmental Stress and Conflict Archives

Climate Change’s Costs Hit the Plate

By vbase / July 24, 2012

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.

All’s Not Lost, Ontario. The Future Is Green, Not Black

By vbase / April 7, 2012

Ontario, we’re told, is Canada’s new rust belt. The high dollar is pummelling the province’s exports. Big manufacturers are fleeing. The Liberal government is slashing spending to maintain the province’s credit rating.

Our Peak Oil Premium

By vbase / February 1, 2012

Humankind will have to invest staggering resources to find and produce new oil if global output is to grow steadily. We’re likely much closer to the tipping point than optimists think

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

By vbase / January 22, 2012

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

By vbase / December 12, 2011

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

By vbase / October 6, 2011

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

By vbase / March 18, 2011

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?

Disaster at the Top of the World

By vbase / August 23, 2010

Standing on the deck of this floating laboratory for Arctic science, which is part of Canada’s Coast Guard fleet and one of the world’s most powerful icebreakers, I can see vivid evidence of climate change.

Responding to the Skeptics

By vbase / December 7, 2009

Skeptics often say Earth’s climate is showing a trend toward stable or even declining temperatures. But they have to cherry-pick data from the climate record to support this argument.

The Enticements of Green Carrots

By vbase / August 9, 2009

We Canadians like to think we are green, but when it comes to protecting the environment, we are among the world’s worst actors. Whether the metric is carbon output per capita, toxic waste emissions or protection of endangered species, Canada regularly ranks near the bottom of the list of similarly wealthy countries.

If our economy’s incentives start pulling in the same direction as our ethical impulses, Canadians can do better. At present, they are pulling in opposite directions.