KG Abbot

Medium •

Obstructing Climate Action — No Longer Denying the Science, Just Blocking the Solution

Climate obstruction is now less about denying global warming and more about preventing action on it. The tactics include delay, greenwashing, legal challenges, and claims that climate policies are too expensive or ineffective. Fossil-fuel interests and allied actors help spread these messages to slow reforms. The result is that debate shifts away from the science and toward excuses that keep meaningful climate policy from moving forward.
Medium •

Trading Pollution: the Murky World of Carbon Credits

The Great Lakes of North America are composed of five brutes: Superior, Michigan, Huron, Erie, and Ontario. They are freshwater, they are interconnected, and they span the border between Canada and the US. Technically, Michigan and Huron are really the same water body, joined as they are by the Straits of Mackinac. The Saint Lawrence river connects them to the Atlantic Ocean and they are, too, connected to the Mississippi River basin by the Illinois Waterway. By their combined volume, the lakes...
Medium •

How LA Smog Triggered 80 years of Climate Change Misinformation

In 1943, Los Angeles was an energetic city, its population ballooning, its industry robust, and its wider prospects increasingly rosy. World War II may well have started to leave its mark — where white US servicemen stationed there and young Mexican American men clashed in the Zoot Suit Riots that June — but the sun seemingly shone on the city. Hollywood, even then, was a vibrant centre for entertainment. The government too, was busy with its investments and developments in the city’s planning a...
Medium •

‘Carbon Bombs’: the World’s Largest Fossil Fuel Projects

The term “carbon bomb” may once have seemed like an attempt to inject some drama into climate reporting. These days, however, the term has a more specific meaning: a fossil fuel extraction project that will generate more than one gigatonne of CO₂ (1 GtCO₂) over its remaining lifetime.Surprisingly, the term isn’t much known outside industry, science, and activism, but it should be. According to the research paper “Carbon Bombs — Mapping key fossil fuel projects” published in Energy Policy, there...
Medium •

Good COP, Bad COP — A History of Inaction and Flexible Morality

In November, André Aranha Corrêa do Lago will play president and host to the 30th UN Climate Change Conference, to be held in Belem in Brazil. It will mark a 31 year period of high profile gatherings (one was postponed for the pandemic) that were once hailed as a new era in confronting the climate question, but have, in reality, failed on almost every front.The COPS have been a hollow advert for the plight of the natural world, and been subject to attempts to co-opt or corrupt the agenda. The ga...
Medium •

What might Winston Churchill say, in the face of the Climate Change Crisis…?

Ladies and gentlemen of the British Isles, I stand before you today not as a war leader rallying against an enemy of flesh and blood, but as a sentinel heralding a clarion call to arms against a more insidious and pervasive foe: climate change. The tale of our awakening to this peril is a chronicle of slow realization, punctuated by moments of stark revelation and alarming urgency.In the twilight of the 19th century, a few pioneering minds began to whisper of the profound impact our industrial p...
Medium •

The Simplicity of the Climate Change Consensus

The science itself might be complex, and experts have raced in recent decades to catch up with the mutability of the situation, but measuring how scientists agree on what the problem is, isn’t, well, rocket science. If you don’t think man-made climate change is happening, you just don’t understand. The time for being allowed to publicly deny anthropogenic climate change is gone. There are too many lives hanging in the balance.When I look up and see a plane cruising past overhead – nervous flyer...
Medium •

The Absurdity of Climate Change Denial

The frustrating excuses of the environmentally ignorant…Awareness of the climate change issue has been with us for quite some time. Indeed, as alluded to by the World Bank, there is evidence suggesting we have known about it for around 128 years (with a Swedish scientist by the name of Svante Arrhenius no less). This would probably come as a surprise to most. But then, that in itself isn’t a surprise because the wider public didn’t have any meaningful awareness of the problem for the next 100 ye...
Nu-Credits •

Financing Green Trade in a Climate Crisis

Even though the media furor regarding Glasgow COP26 has died down somewhat, one can be sure the next frenzy is sitting in the wings, waiting to take its place in news headlines once again, as, obviously, the topic of climate change isn’t going anywhere. Because global trade sits at the heart of most human endeavors, it too then sits at the heart of the climate question, and the financing of trade looking forward is going to play a vital role in addressing the issues. What then is green trade fin...