“The rush to make profits out of carbon-fixing engenders another kind of colonialism.” Introduction We’re all familiar with the ongoing planetary biocrisis. Global temperatures are predicted to rise by 4°C by 2100, with recent research warning of a 6°C rise by 2100, a far cry from the 2°C target deemed […]

A few years ago, the Maldives was the poster child of climate change. Scarce in land, abundant in natural beauty, and hovering dangerously close to sea level, this archipelago in the middle of the Indian Ocean provided an urgent image of a sinking nation. It appealed to the popular imagination and […]

Today it often feels as though we are hopelessly mired in apocalyptic thinking, both in our social movements and in popular culture. From Hollywood blockbusters to art house dystopias, and from hip-hop lyrics to “serious” literature, images of irreversible climate chaos, interminable warfare, and total societal collapse seem increasingly inescapable. […]

To anybody who has ever gone around Europe or North America giving talks or workshops on environmental politics, the scene will be familiar. At some stage a person sitting in the front row will stand up to wonder aloud what the point of the discussion is given that the world is going […]

Climate change is already here, although the effects are unevenly distributed. Last winter saw a series of storms of record-breaking wind speeds, rainfall, and intensity hit the UK. California’s current drought has seen lakes disappear into parched earth. Giant craters have begun appearing in Siberia, as methane explodes out of thawing […]

“We’ve got to look after our children; we have to look after our future; and we have to grow the economy and create jobs. We can do all of that as long as we don’t fear the future; instead we seize it.” ~ Barack Obama. About twenty years ago someone wrote a speech […]

The most recent reports from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) make use of ‘Representative Concentration Pathways’ (RCPs). These are tools to represent possible future world greenhouse gas emissions. There are four RCPs. Only the most aggressive, RCP 2.6, gives a chance of keeping global average temperature rises […]

Capitalism is locking-in climate change for centuries, but in the process, making radical social change more realistic than tinkering around the edges. I : Ruins There is an oft-quoted passage from the Spanish anarchist militant Buenaventura Durruti. Many readers will know it by heart. It reads: “It is we who […]

OT: What is Grow Heathrow? What’s it about and how linked are you to the transition town movement? Paddy: Grow Heathrow is a squatted market garden in the centre of where the third runway was due to be built. Our project was set up by Transition Heathrow which was a […]

The growth in ‘green’ energy has been a staple in recent UK energy policies, which have traditionally been dominated by a proliferation of gas power stations, large-scale fracking, government support for nuclear power and a bonanza in oil licenses. The share of electricity classed as renewable reached 9.4% in 2011 and, […]