environment & energy
World Government Summit
This February 2017, Thomas Homer-Dixon spoke at the World Government Summit on "Climate Change and Food Supply."
Canada Must not Give Up the Fight on Climate Change
Those of us concerned about climate change generally inhabit an old-fashioned reality-based world. Scientific research and evidence drive our concern. Although we wish the climate problem would vanish, that motivation doesn’t override what science tells us.
Our Fukushima Moment
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?
And Now the Weather: Nasty and Brutish
People who think this winter’s brutish weather proves climate change isn’t real might want to think again.
Disaster at the Top of the World
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
with Andrew Weaver | 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
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.
The Great Transformation: Climate Change as Cultural Change
A critical conversation about climate change is going on right now through the UNFCCC process; a key stage in this process will be the Copenhagen meeting at the end of this year. This conversation, to the extent that it is prescriptive, generally emphasizes technology and economics. It stresses strategies for dealing with the climate problem that involve technical aspects of, for instance, societies’ energy mix and energy efficiency. I don’t want to disparage these approaches or suggest that they shouldn’t be pursued. But, the fact remains that despite all our efforts we seem to be falling further and further behind.
Clean Coal? Go Underground, Alberta
with Julio Friedmann | Alberta appears to be in a box – an energy box – that constrains policy options in every direction. The province’s wealth is critically tied to exploitation of its vast hydrocarbon resources.
Climate Change, The Arctic and Canada: Avoiding Yesterday’s Analysis of Tomorrow’s Crisis
Paper Prepared for the 20th Anniversary Conference of the National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy, Ottawa, Ontario
Blocking the Sky to Save the Earth
with David Keith | To the relief of climate scientists around the world, it appears that the polar ice cap hasn’t shrunk as much this summer as it did last summer.
A Win-Win-Win Situation
with David Keith | What should we do with the carbon we produce when we burn fossil fuels? Some experts say we should fight climate change by putting the carbon back underground, whence it came.
Positive Feedbacks, Dynamic Ice Sheets, and the Recarbonization of the Global Fuel Supply: The New Sense of Urgency about Global Warming
A Globally Integrated Climate Policy for Canada, University of Toronto Press, 2008.
With Cracks and Holes in the Greenland Ice Sheet, We May Well Have to “Geo-Engineer” the Climate
A few years ago, these scientists regarded global warming as a matter of serious concern; now many appear to think that it's a matter of grave urgency - that we may be running out of time. The recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports are increasingly viewed as out of date.
