Pain is a natural outcome of being told—and experiencing—that wildfires, hurricanes, and floods are becoming more ferocious due to the climate crisis, and that droughts are getting more serious and lasting longer. It is reasonable to get worried when the World Bank foresees that 140 million climate migrants will be fleeing ecological catastrophes and the […]
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Our study also showed that the psychological distress young people experience over the climate crisis isn’t just about the degrading state of the environment. Rather, it is linked to perceptions of government betrayal and being lied to by leaders who are taking inadequate climate change action while pretending otherwise. Wray, Britt. Generation Dread: Finding Purpose […]
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Sources writing about the fossil fuel divestment movement sometimes seem to think that 350.org and “Fossil Free” are distinct organizations, despite the footer at https://gofossilfree.org/ reading “Fossil Free is a project of 350.org”. In part, this may be because of how easy it can be with 350.org to confuse branding with organizations. The clearest example […]
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I have seen a lot of discussion about Jonathan Haidt’s recent article in The Atlantic about how social media has broken US politics. It contains some important criticisms of the progressive left, as well as the authoritarian right — particularly about their demand that all speech and thought should conform to their ideological agenda. On […]
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While outside the area of climate change policy, the concept and slogan of “defunding the police” is revealing about important dynamics between progressive activist politics and policy-making by those who actually win power. As The Economist reported in 2021: The critical division is over whether or not the plan is a pretext to “defund the […]
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United Nations secretary general’s remarks on the ongoing release of the IPCC’s sixth assessment report are remarkable for their directness and candour: “Climate activists are sometimes depicted as dangerous radicals,” said UN Secretary-General António Guterres during the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) news conference on Monday. “But the truly dangerous radicals are the countries […]
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Today I saw a Twitter post with some text that governments cut from the Summary for Policymakers from the 6th Assessment Report (AR6) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC): B6.4. Factors limiting ambitious transformation include structural barriers, an incremental rather than systemic approach, lack of coordination, inertia, lock-in to infrastructure and assets, and […]
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As Toronto, Canada, and the rest of the world are dismantling their public health protection measures (masks are now mostly voluntary in Ontario) it seems like people’s frustration has gotten ahead of the reality that there will be further waves and variants, in part because of unequitable and insufficient vaccine distriubution globally and also partly […]
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What makes Rousseau and his self-described ‘history of the human heart,’ so astonishingly germane and eerily resonant is that, unlike his fellow eighteenth-century writers, he described the quintessential inner experience of modernity for most people: the uprooted outsider in the commercial metropolis, aspiring for a place in it, and struggling with complex feelings of envy, […]
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The current consensus among memory researchers is that we need other capacities to be in place, skills that are not directly to do with the storage of information, before we can hope to carry our memories forward into later childhood and adulthood. One such factor is language. As soon as you can use words to […]
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