🌡️ News
How the Green New Deal Lost, and Won, and Could Lose Again
Robinson Meyer, The Atlantic (Tweet)
The Green New Deal is how Democrats talk about, and propose to address, a revelation that was already sweeping global politics: the truth that climate change is not an environmental issue in the same way as smog or acid rain. Carbon-based fuels, and thus heat-trapping carbon emissions, are not so much sewn into the fabric of our economic system as they are its warp and weft. And while that is slowly changing, any tactless attempt to rip out carbon risks rending the garment. The Green New Deal assumes that carbon is core to modern society, and it proceeds with decarbonization accordingly. As the global historian Adam Tooze put it during a recent lecture: The Green New Deal “turns the question from polar bears and icebergs to political economy.”
Apocalypse Got You Down? Maybe This Will Help
By Cara Buckley, New York Times (Tweet)
One day early this fall, 19 people gathered in a small event space in Red Hook, Brooklyn, and sat in a circle. They included an immigration lawyer, a therapist, an Extinction Rebellion protester, an artist and me. Outside, it was cloudlessly sunny and hot in a way that would have once been described as unseasonable but that nowadays is just mid-September.
We were there for a workshop called “Cultivating Active Hope: Living With Joy Amidst the Climate Crisis,” a title that sounded wildly optimistic. I was there because, for the life of me, I could not understand how anyone was coping with the climate crisis.
The year’s best documentary turns climate change into a sci-fi film
Alissa Wilkinson, Vox (Tweet)
One of the best documentaries of the year is also, on its surface, one of the simplest. To make The Hottest August, director Brett Story spent the month of August 2017 talking to New Yorkers about their hopes for the future as well as their anxieties. Story and her crew visited many well-traveled spots — Midtown Manhattan, people’s front stoops in brownstone Brooklyn — as well as some out-of-the-way places like Rockaway Beach, where residents worried about an eroding shoreline even before Hurricane Sandy devastated the area in 2012.
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