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For those who haven’t seen it before, here is my review of The Climate Book, by Greta Thunberg…
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I've read dozens of books about climate change, and this one is easily the best. It's packed with information, written to be accessible for anyone from high school (or a bright middle school student) on up, and most importantly it does NOT shy away from the true severity of our situation and the imperative need not only for individual action but for system change.

It's stunning to me that a young woman who just turned twenty years old was able to pull together such a massive project — coordinating the submissions of more than a hundred scientists, activists, and educators — while also writing a large part of the content herself. A truly amazing accomplishment.

This essential work should be in every school library and in every home. It will remain relevant for years to come, I believe, because although there certainly is plenty of data, mostly it's about *ideas* which will never age.
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https://bookwyrm.social/user/BreadAndCircuses/review/1196642/s/essential-reading#anchor-1196642

#Environment #Climate #ClimateChange #ClimateCrisis #ClimateEmergency #CO2 #Emissions #Capitalism #BusinessAsUsual #ClimateAction #ClimateJustice


We can have one of two things — but not both.

We can either have a society that tolerates millionaires and billionaires polluting the planet and destroying the biosphere. Or we can have a planet with a healthy biosphere but with fewer millionaires and no billionaires at all.

This is from a recently published peer-reviewed scientific paper titled “Millionaire Spending Incompatible with 1.5 C Ambitions”...
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Much evidence suggests that the wealthiest individuals contribute disproportionately to climate change. Here we study the implications of a continued growth in the number of millionaires for emissions, and its impact on the depletion of the remaining carbon budget to limit global warming to 1.5°C.

Our findings suggest that the share of millionaires in the world population will grow from 0.7% today to 3.3% in 2050, and cause accumulated emissions equivalent to 72% of the remaining carbon budget. This significantly reduces the chance of stabilizing climate change at 1.5°C.

The concentration of wealth at the top means that a significant share of the remaining carbon budget to 1.5°C is depleted by a very small share of humanity. This comparably small group is also likely to invest its wealth in ways that further increase emissions.

Continued growth in emissions at the top makes a low-carbon transition less likely, as the acceleration of energy consumption by the wealthiest is likely beyond the system's capacity to decarbonize. To this end, we question whether policy designs such as progressive taxes targeting the high emitters will be sufficient.
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Like I said, we can have one thing or the other — but not both.

READ THE PAPER --https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666791622000252

#Politics #Capitalism #Inequality #CO2 #Emissions #Environment #Climate #ClimateChange #ClimateCrisis #ClimateAction #ClimateJustice


There's an interesting new paper in the journal Ecological Economics. The title is:

"Assessing US consumers' carbon footprints reveals outsized impact of top 1%"
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0921800922003597

This is from the abstract --

Unsustainable environmental degradation and extreme economic inequality are two of humanity's most pressing challenges. They are intimately linked. Climate-altering greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions are disproportionately driven by consumption among wealthy and socially privileged groups, yet poorer and socially marginalized peoples face disproportionate climate harms.
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What really grabbed me, however, was the chart below, created by Andrew Fanning using data contained in the paper. It clearly illustrates the massive scale of carbon inequality in our modern society.

#Inequality #GreenhouseGases #Emissions #ClimateCrisis #ClimateJustice